


Heartache and War

by Infernalitae



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: 1940s aesthetic, Angst, Bittersweet, Catharsis, Collins Lives, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Farrier Gives Me so Many Feelings, Farrier is a Badass and You Can't Change My Mind, Feelings, Fighter Pilots, Fleshed-Out OFC, Internal Conflict, No 40s-Misogyny, Period-Inaccurate Relationship, Purging Demons, Romance, This is a love story, Tragic Romance, Trauma, Vintage Romance, War, World War II, also sex, did i mention feelings, sort of slow burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:14:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 30,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23743618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Infernalitae/pseuds/Infernalitae
Summary: Their orders had been very specific: they were not to stay. Get out to the evacuation point. Provide as much air support as possible. Get back. Farrier makes an impossible choice - knowing very well it will inevitably end in capture and death, and knowing what it is he will be leaving behind. In the midst of a war there can only ever be heartache.
Relationships: Farrier (Dunkirk)/Original Female Character(s)
Kudos: 19





	1. Part 1 - Before

**Author's Note:**

> For mood, listen to these two tracks from the Dunkirk OST in places where marked by the asterisk.
> 
> * “Supermarine” (Tread with caution if anxiety is a concern for you)  
> ** “Variation 15”

* * *

**~June 1940~**

It didn’t take long to grow weary of war.

If a man could hold onto the dreams of glory, valor, and victory consumed like sustenance as a boy after living through three months of war, he was of the opinion that this man could not be entirely sane. Hell, he himself wasn’t entirely sane – could any soldier say different? – and he had long ago learned that glory was a myth, valor a rarity, and that victory didn’t exist at all.

The only victory was in doing one’s duty and being lucky enough to come home after.

He knew his point of view wasn’t the stuff of inspirational motivation. For all that he had still been only a boy during the Great War and thus only so aware, he also knew people, and knew that the War to End All Wars had ended nothing. He had spoken to enough officers that had lived it, had seen enough of the records, to know this truth. It hadn’t stopped him from being there the instant Germany ignored the ultimatum issued them and Britain sent its pilots to begin raiding the fleet. It hadn’t stopped him from shooting down German aircraft attempting to defend their ships. But the almost futile nature of those raids had been no surprise to him.

War was nothing short of hell on earth. An evil that became sometimes necessity. And morale was one necessity to fuel the other, so he kept his thoughts to himself, kept his mouth shut, and did his job. But he did not pretend he was living in a world gone any less mad.

It earned him something of a reputation among his fellows: that he was surly and unsociable, jaded, old. He didn’t much care what they said of him. It was true that he was something of a solitary creature, particular about the company he kept and suffered no boyish fools with heads full of visions of their own inevitable heroism. He didn’t tend to partake of many of the forced moral-building social gatherings the corps used to try and ease the tension in their men except to grab the odd drink. He was older than many, younger than some, and he was unquestionably, without a doubt, jaded.

Farrier was a simple man. He had become a pilot for the thrill and the challenge of it, the love of the sky. He was RAF to honor the father he’d lost to that last war, and because it was right, and that was enough. He had much more to fight for than slippery, elusive concepts. Real things. Things he could taste and touch and were of far more value.

Things like human decency, the sanctity of life. His fellows in arms. His country. But there were also the little things. The cozy little house with the garden in back. A few hours with a good book, or tea and the morning paper. Ellie.

Though she was by no means a little thing. Physically, perhaps, but not in spirit. Not at all

While it was hardly the worst of the costs of war, it was the one he felt the most frequently and dearly, every day he spent in service. It had been nearly nine months. He missed his wife. He was a simple man, after all.

The months of death were wearing on him – waves to a cliff-face. And while he stood by his principles and stood by his country, more than anything he wanted it to be over. Wanted to go home. But the orders kept coming, the battles kept growing progressively worse, and the looming understanding that this war would turn out neither brief nor leave them unscarred was a significant weight on his soul.

When the order came to fly out to Dunkirk, to cover the evacuation, the situation had already been well recognized as a disaster – the low of the lowest points so far and a dire loss with the potential to become irreparably devastating. The only reason they had been sent was because of timing. The rest of the squadrons in the immediate area were either occupied or had been called back much too late to allow for such a quick turn around and were therefore not yet prepared to go out again. Which left just the three of them to fly out from Suffolk in the hope that they could keep the Luftwaffe occupied long enough to get some of their soldiers to safety.

Some.

It couldn’t be all. There wasn’t the means.

The dread had been there from the start: clouded over them like the smoke over the cities, only just visible along the horizon of gray-blue water. A creeping sense of doom.

“Stay down at five-hundred feet to leave fuel for forty minute fighting time,” Chapman said, voice thin and slightly strained through the radio at his ear. “Keep an eye on that gauge—save enough to get back.”

Three fighters. Forty minutes. Not odds even the most hardened of gamblers would take.

He heard Collins lament the distance. “Down here we’re sittin’ ducks,” he complained, head sure to be at a constant, watchful swivel, and Farrier quite agreed.

It would have been better for everyone involved if the evacuation could have taken place in Calais. It was closer to the crossing point of Dover, though not for them specifically; they would have been able to refuel, had more time to do the job they were sent to, and the crossings would have been smoother, quicker. Less of the royal cockup this had turned out to be. But whether by plan or bad luck, the enemy had made short work of that, driving the Allied men up the coast northeast.

What was certain, neither pilot needed the caution their squad leader gave to watch their tails.

His neck craned to one side, just catching the flash of metal backed by the sun.

“Bandit—eleven o’clock.”

Smooth as silk they broke rank.

As far as dogfights went it was brief. Though the German fighter went right for Collins – intent on shooting him down into the sea – with a bit of smooth air and a familiarity forged from months spent in skirmishes together they were able to keep Collins in the air and send the enemy plane in his stead.

Leaning, he looked down at the waves rolling lazily below to watch the fighter break the surface, slamming into the drink, a blazing, smoking wreck.

“Yep, he’s down.”

He ducked instinctively at the sudden drone of an engine far too close as a second plane dropped down from the sky above him, a spike of terror ripping through him as he heard the shots land with the dull, tinny sound of denting aluminum directly behind his right shoulder. But the short spray of bullets did only surface damage and the pilot didn’t stick around to engage further.

He allowed himself a heavy breath through his teeth to release some tension.

“Fortis Leader, one bandit down,” he reported, and only once it left his mouth did he realize he hadn’t heard Chapman’s voice since the first plane had come at them.

He felt it almost immediately: the sense of dread like a sliver beneath the nail, wedging deeper into the skin with every second. There was a chance Chapman might not be lost to the sea, a chance he was still alive. But Farrier had seen too many fliers downed to put his hope in a basket that was almost certainly rotted through. When they passed over the wreckage of the British plane and no sign of a chute a few moments after, he knew it had been wise not to hope, and took on command with the acceptance that he was now in mourning for a good man.

He’d been mourning many good men of late, and many more a little less good. At the end of the day it didn’t matter what he thought of the individual, every lost life was a waste. Even an enemy’s. Every man was blood and bone. Every man left someone behind.

For what felt like the thousandth time just this month his mind drifted to who he would have been leaving behind.

Her last letter had reached him a month ago and had been written two weeks prior to that. She had constructed a new pair of raised beds, it had read, to grow extra vegetables in light of the ever-increasing rationing, and she had started going to work up in London making munitions, of all things. While she would have said it had nothing at all to do with him and everything to do with the general need, that someone must and so it may as well be her, he knew that was only part of the story. That it likely made her feel as if she were, in her way, protecting him as he was protecting her – indirectly and from a vast distance. In truth, it was a comfort to know she was busy, just as it was a comfort to know someone as meticulous as she was bolstering English munitions supply.

That was Ellie. Steadfast, endlessly patient, stubborn as a cranky mule, and full of a low, smoldering kind of fire. The kind that lasted long into the early morning without ever going out.

He hadn’t really intended on marrying, not that he’d actively planned not to. He’d simply had too many other things on his mind, too much else to do. He supposed he might have assumed it was something to be dealt with later if it must be dealt with at all, though he was already comfortably in his thirties. Or else that he would be content to remain a bachelor for the rest of his days. While he had done his share of flirting and dallying, he had never put his energy very seriously into a woman, and the women he spent his time with expected nothing more.

That had changed rather suddenly, and rather like standing up too fast and clocking his head on a piece of iron scaffolding.

_It was by complete chance they happened to frequent the same pub that night: he out with a few fellow servicemen to blow off the week’s excess energy and maybe find a soft, pretty companion to take home for a few hours, she with a pair of friends or sisters (the former, he would later learn) sitting down for after-work drinks to catch up._

_The second he walked in he noticed her. He would have been blind and far more stupid than he was at that age not to. She was wearing white, both fitting for the summer weather and turning her into a bright beacon in the center of the room. Her hair was long enough to brush her shoulders, a shade somewhere between gold and red that he didn’t know the name for – wasn’t sure there_ was _a name for – and been pinned back from the face that belonged on a film star. With a figure to match._

_Though he would have denied it, he began fantasizing immediately about what she would taste like if he kissed her, what it would feel like to hold her against him._

_He wasn’t the only one of his crew to notice, either._

_No sooner had their first round of beers hit the table Stephens was swaggering his way over to hers while the rest of them looked on, half encouraging, half envious, and absolutely readying to take the mickey out of the kid whatever the result. He watched, perhaps a bit too closely, swigging his beer as Stephens leaned in to be heard over the din, as she looked up, little pointed chin angled toward the swarthy young man in the uniform. Her smile was polite, but even from across the room he could make out the almost wicked amusement at the corner of her lips._

_He wouldn’t find out what words were exchanged. He saw only that Stephens returned, defeated and a little mulish, determined to get roaring drunk, and knew right then that this was not the kind of woman interested in or suited to a sloppy one-night fling._

_Any other time he would have mourned the waste and moved on, found another girl to turn his attention to and been all the happier for it. But as many other pretty, willing ladies as there were that night, he found himself thoroughly uninterested._

_He observed from across the room as she talked with the two other girls: animated, but not frenetic, her gesticulation considered and unhurried. Her smiles were easy, maybe a bit too wide to have been described as perfect, but he honestly didn’t notice anything but how much he wanted to hear what she was saying, and how damn lovely she was when she laughed. Had the other boys not been quite so well on the way toward being completely pissed and occupied with their own chosen companions for the evening, he would have been ridiculed something horrendous for how_ not _covert he was about his staring. And he wouldn’t have given a single damn about it._

_Though he hadn’t really intended to, when the two other girls stepped away for moment, leaving her alone, he was up and walking – not sure what the hell he thought he was doing or what the hell he expected to come of it._

_She held a lit cigarette between two fingers and scarlet-painted nails, though she hadn’t yet set it to her lips when he stopped beside her table. Her head cocked slightly to the side to regard him with another tiny smile. Her eyes, he noticed, were the blue-and-gray of ocean water, framed in thick lashes smudged dark._

_“Hello,” he said, with a whiskey smoothness that did him proud._

_“Hello.” She had a voice like a club singer, low and sweet and a little smoky. He wanted to bathe in it. “Come to try your hand, then?”_

_“Thought I might.”_

_“And what makes you think you’ll fare better than your friend over there?”_

_She tipped her chin toward where he knew Stephens was grousing into his fourth beer, understanding that if she had seen where the other man went then she might also be aware that he had been staring at her almost nonstop for the past two hours. Well, he certainly wasn’t ashamed of that. But whether or not it worked in his favor remained to be seen._

_He was older than Stephens, it was true, already having broached his thirties. Maybe a bit too old for her taste. But with age came calm and surety and he was confident that he had far more to offer than the junior engine tech did. Or else that’s what he told himself in the moment._

_“Business acquaintance more than friend,” he corrected, pleased when her eyes dropped ever so slightly to focus on his mouth when he offered his own smile. He might have been more on the rough-hewn side of decent-looking – rakish to some, and certainly not a pretty boy – but he had it on good authority that his mouth was one of his more beguiling features. “And because,” he added then, “unlike said acquaintance, I know how to treat a lady.”_

_One slender eyebrow arched, the corner of her lips curling a little more as she gave him a pointed once-over, taking him in from hair to crisp blue uniform to the toes of his dress shoes. “Of course you do,” she said flatly, as if she thought his statement presumptuous and intended to make sure he knew it._

_Never in his life had he thought himself capable of being so, but he was utterly smitten._

_In another woman he might have thought it a line meant to goad him on, that she flirted with a bit of a bite – which he was normally quite partial to. Especially when paired with a look like that. He’d seen in often enough not to think himself over-confident. She thought him attractive, or at least intriguing. But she wasn’t flirting, she simply had an edge to her tongue when she spoke her mind._

_Oh, no. Not the kind of woman content to spend her time fooling around with the likes of him._

_While her words were light, perhaps even a bit playful, she was definitely telling him to move along – that she was not in the mood to be bothered by yet one more half-drunk prat in a uniform. He was definitely being dismissed, which he respected. There had been an influx in Army personnel in the area over the past few weeks: one couldn’t go ten feet without tripping over a pack of brown jobs, and he imagined being female, let alone as lovely as she was, garnered more harassment than most women would have liked. He certainly didn’t want to be just one more in a string of idiots intent on pestering her, but there was a voice in his brain screaming that if he just turned and left, he would regret it until they put him in his grave._

_The force of this certainty was perplexing. He was hardly fickle, but to be so staunchly sure, down to his bones, that it would be a mistake not to do anything and everything he could to gain the interest of this particular woman he’d never seen or spoken to before…it was not something he was familiar with. But he_ was _familiar with deferring to gut intuition, which was what he did then._

_“I don’t want to interrupt your night,” he told her truthfully, “but I wanted to tell you I’m here most Friday nights and…if there’s ever a time you might fancy it, I’d like to keep you company.”_

_It was not the smoothest he had ever been, though it hadn’t – thank Christ – been downright clumsy. He had never been very charming, and not all that skilled with words. He was plain-spoken, straightforward, and usually relied on other things where it concerned interacting with women. It had also partly been a lie. He had frequented this particular pub maybe two or three times in the five months he’d been stationed in the area. But he certainly intended to be from this point on. If it got him even an inch nearer to spending time with her, he would do pretty much anything._

_He didn’t believe in destiny or love at first sight or any of that rubbish, but if he’d had a few more beers in him he might have been tempted to say it felt that way. That it was as if he were being drawn magnetically to her._

_Her smile faded somewhat, her eyes gone a little wary around the edges. She regarded him quietly for a moment, and he had the distinct feeling that she was concealing surprise._

_“Is that so?” Not quite a question: measured, muffled slightly by the cigarette._

_Her lips parted, a soft shell pink, to close around the filter, and for a woman decidedly_ not _flirting, she seemed to be doing her damndest to ensure his dreams for the next few weeks were filled with nothing but her._

_“Mmm,” had been his hum of assent, swallowed in part by the noise enveloping them on all sides._

_Her friends wandered back then, slowing as they neared the little table and caught sight of him, and he took that as his cue._

_“Ladies,” he said with nod to all three of them and promptly took his leave, retreating back to his table and the half-empty beer he’d left there, tolerating the mild ribbing he received for his lack of success as it appeared to them._

_He was less certain of what it was. Could he call it failure if he had accomplished what he had set out to, which was to make his interest known? That was all he could do. He had laid the offer in front of her, but now it was up to her to decide what to do with it. And up to him, apparently, to wait with his stomach churning like a prepubescent boy’s._

_He made sure to keep close measure on how often he looked at her from that point, and for how long, not wanting to seem like a cretin, or barmy out of his mind. Yet he would have sworn at least a few times he caught her glancing back. When she and the other girls rose a little while later, gathering gloves and bags and smoothing clothes, he was sure of it._

_As her friends waited by the door, she made her way straight for him, the graceful swish of her skirt about her calves with each step going straight to his head the same way an additional four beers would have._

_“Friday after next,” she informed him in a tone light as cloud. “No promises.”_

_With that she swept out the door, leaving him breathless, dazed, and – hand to god – half stiff in his damn trousers._

_He took her words to heart, knowing full well it was probable that she wouldn’t show. Two weeks later, when she walked in to find him already there waiting, he read on her face that she had been thinking the same about him._

If asked, he wouldn’t claim to have pursued her with the clear objective of marrying her – he’d gone that long without a wife, after all. But it hadn’t really been so much about wanting a wife as it had been about wanting her: the beautiful woman with a bit of bite to her words and salt to her smile. The woman he’d taken dancing even while repeatedly warning her that he was a horrid excuse for a dancer, and who insisted sweetly afterwards that he wasn’t all that bad though she certainly hoped he was more graceful in the air than on a dance floor.

He had seen her, the way her nose crinkled with laughter, the steady assurance in her bearing which never failed to center him. He’d spoken and danced with her, and soppy rot that it was, he’d wanted her in a way he hadn't ever really wanted a woman before.

He’d told her as much, though not right away. Outing number three, he thought, or four – when his caution against accidentally running her off had given way to his need to be upfront.

They had been walking back to the boarding house she was calling home; her preference over taking a cab. He’d gladly seized the excuse to prolong his time with her since there was simply never enough of it, and made it most of the way back before he was blurting it out. Perhaps more plainly and with perhaps less grace than the situation had called for.

Turning to face him, she had set her shoulders and the back of her head against the brick exterior of the building. The night had been a mild one, and she’d worn her coat open over her dress. A long, downright slinky velvet number so deep a burgundy that he could never determine was more purple or red in hue. With a modest enough neckline, but a back that dipped low enough that he’d had to focus to mind his hands when all he had wanted to do was touch her. When she’d leaned back like that, tipping her chin up as if inviting him to kiss her, it had almost undone him.

“You scare me,” she had confessed, a soft little whisper well suited to a church. He had been utterly baffled and more than a little alarmed.

He terrified her, she had explained then, because he was so well settled into himself, a man who was _very much a man_ , as she’d put it, and who had no business wanting a girl as unworldly and simple as she was for anything more than a dalliance. He terrified her because he was tall and imposing and a little gruff, and because he made her feel lightheaded and giddy like she had drunk her weight in wine just by being near her.

She had called him handsome as though mourning that she thought so, as though it were an irksome fact, and told him outright that she had been hoping he would turn out to be a loathsome bastard so that she could just kick him to the curb and forget about him. But she had found he was neither, and that she rather liked him. Which scared her because all liking him could do was land her with a broken heart. And then – because (or so he suspected) she’d had a bit much to drink out of nerves – she had shoved from the wall and straight into him, soft little hands curling against the front of his shirt. And she had kissed him.

It had been tame as far as kisses went, a brief press of lips lasting no longer than a second. But it had been enough to ruin him for any woman’s mouth but hers.

Adorably flustered with herself, she had pushed away, told him firmly that that was as far as it would ever go and that he’d be better off not wasting his time. But he had never been indecisive, even in his youth, and whether or not the first thing she said was true the second was not. Even if she never touched him again, no time spent with her could ever be less than time spent precisely as it should be. If it took the rest of his life to convince her otherwise, it would not be a life wasted.

The next time he had gone to ask if she would come out with him, she had met him with a warm, somewhat embarrassed smile and a soft: “all right.”

Eventually she came to accept his sincerity, but she had still made him work for it. Which he had, truth be told, thoroughly enjoyed. The only thing he'd enjoyed more was hearing her say: “ _I love you, you insufferable arse,”_ the morning they had signed the marriage license.

That had been six months before he’d been called to fight, little more than a year since that Friday night in the little pub tucked in the east end of London.

A year and a half. It hadn’t been near enough. And if he was a bit cantankerous it was because he was too damn jaded to endure the brass and bluster of all the pups the RAF had resorted to manning their planes, and if it made him an old man to just want to go home because he was tired of death and he missed his wife, then he was a bloody old man.

Fortunately for him, Collins – having a sweetheart of his own back home – understood and sympathized.

They’d both been lucky in their assignment. Chances had been good they each might have been stuck with some idiot with more bollocks than brain who believed themselves too clever and skilled to trust their wingman or who bogged down the radios with chatter rather than listening to the air. Collins was difficult to rattle and faultlessly reliable, if a bit slow on the trigger. He was easy-natured, a good balance to Farrier’s own tendencies toward the taciturn. And while he followed orders without question, he didn’t prioritize chain of command over what needed doing – which Farrier had come to respect and appreciate immensely.

Camaraderie was easily forged in times of near-constant strain. War bonded men easily, even sometimes among those who didn’t particularly like one another otherwise. But with the amount of time they’d spent together in the last few months, in situations of varying degrees of tension and recovery and rest, he’d become rather genuinely fond of the man. A sentiment Collins evidently returned. He had recently taken to calling Farrier an honorary Scot for his habit of speaking with short, wordless sounds and a dauntless lack of care in the face of foul weather. 

(*)

Twenty minutes out from the coast he checked his fuel gauge and saw the glass was cracked, the needle remaining motionless as he tapped the button. Damaged, no doubt, at some point in the skirmish. Not vital compared to what it might have been, but it could very quickly become a problem.

“Fortis Two, what’s your fuel?” he asked, his words muffled in his own ears by the respirator and ear guards.

There was a pause, followed shortly by: “Fifty gallons, over.”

Checking the watch strapped to his harness he noted the time and jotted the numbers onto the fuselage with a stick of chalk.

“All right, keep letting me know. My gauge took a bit of a knock.”

“Shouldn’t you turn back?” Collins’ light Scots burr held a note of concern.

“No, no,” Farrier sighed, “I’m fairly confident it’s just the gauge.” He had to assume there wasn’t a fuel leak as well, for there was nothing to be done about that in the middle of the water, and no guarantees that if there was he would make it back if he did turn around.

Unfolding his copy of the flight map he spent a few moment alternating between watching the skies and calculating roughly the rate of time passed to fuel spent. By his approximation they were around five minutes out from the shore, and they would have to decide whether to remain at this low altitude and risk being jumped again or climb to a safer height, using more fuel in the process. Neither was a great option, but they were going to start running into heavy enemy air presence, and of the two, the latter was the only real viable option. If they had high ground going in, they would be able to dive on the German planes from above.

Relaying this to Collins, the two pilots pushed on the throttle and climbed.

“Forty gallons, Fortis One,” Collins noted a few minutes later, and Farrier checked the watch again. So far still on target.

“Forty gallons, understood.”

“Heinkel—” Collins haled suddenly, pulling his attention to the H-11 bomber up ahead targeting the British Minesweeper in the water below. “Eleven o’clock.”

Quickly Farrier marked the new numbers. “Fighters?”

“Two on her starboard.”

“Hmn. I’m on the bomber.”

Without remark, Collins made for the smaller fighters while Farrier set the larger craft in his sights, keeping his acceleration steady to conserve as much fuel as possible.

The Spitfire was an elegant machine. Faster than most planes of its kind and extremely high in performance. If it had a failing it was in the small fuel tank, designed thus to cross the Channel and refuel before taking the trip back. Good for speed, not as much for prolonged fights. The RAF had called back all other squadrons to regroup rather than risk further planes and men on ground as good as overrun, meaning they could not land, let alone refuel. Burning too much on the way over whittled down the amount of time they had to defend the mass retreat.

They’d been in worse situations. They’d been in better, too.

It was at once a gift and a curse that the day was so clear. Visibility was better than it might have been but for the glare of the sun – amplified by the reflective surface of the water – yet this meant it was better for the German pilots as well. He almost would have preferred cloud cover.

Leaning into the turn he guided his vessel around to approach the H-11 from the rear. The next few seconds of his life were a blur of adrenaline wrapped around the frame of the sound from the anti-aircraft cannons installed in the bomber’s tail. It wasn’t completely out of the ordinary for a bomb-carrier to be equipped with gunners, but it was uncommon enough to come as a nasty surprise.

Channeling the spike in his pulse into his concentration he kept as still as possible and laid down hard on the trigger to send a short flurry of rounds. And missed.

The German plane dove swiftly.

“Got ‘em!” Collins cried. One fighter was down.

Farrier looped around again, constantly checking around and above in effort to keep from being snuck up on, and came back up on the bomber from low at the right just as the other plane was drawing over the Sweeper. His thumb held poised over the trigger, palm slick with sweat inside the leather case of his glove. It was going to be close. Close enough to hurt.

Again the concussive hammer of the tail gun, louder in his mind, he knew, than it was in truth. He stayed course, trusting in the hardiness of the Spit and in the poor aim of the German gunner, and the instant he had the sliver of an opening he sucked in a sharp breath and took it.

White smoke bloomed beneath a wing like a burst of blood from a bullet wound. The machine listed sharply left, driven off course.

“She’s turnin’, you must have damaged her.”

He craned his head to the right, scanning the skies for the other fighter. There had been two, hadn’t there? “Where’s the escort?”

“I—”

Collins’ answer broke off into a garbled curse. For a moment there was only rough breathing over the radio as he listened, pulse loud in his own temples as he banked to track the plane that had come screaming down from above them. That had been a hit. The question was how bad of one?

“ _Nh_ —I’m going down,” the other pilot admitted after a moment, frustration and fear setting a harsh slant to the words.

Ice settled cold and granite-heavy in the pit of Farrier’s stomach.

It was a rare circumstance when being shot down over water wasn’t a death sentence. Even if the pilot wasn’t killed when the initial damage was made, bailing out was half as likely to end up killing him as saving him. He had to open the cockpit, heave himself out, and find a way to leap from the plane while keeping clear of engines and moving parts and sometimes flames, then pull his chute and hope it functioned as it was supposed to. Many died unable to free themselves in the first place. Out here, so far from shore, even if Collins managed to somehow climb out on a wing and jump safely, probability was very high that he simply died in the water from either shock or cold or pure exhaustion.

Helplessness was not a feeling Farrier particularly enjoyed, but it was something that came hand in hand with being an airman. On land, even in ships, there was at least some likelihood of help from comrades nearby. It was different in the air. There was nothing a pilot could do when his fellow was shot but watch him fall and pray, more often than not in vain. He had been in these same shoes many times, and it never became any easier – never did any less than stick in his craw and scrape until he bled – but it was especially so just now.

“The swell looks good,” Collins said, his voice warped as though he had unhooked his respirator. “I’m ditching.”

A quick glance down confirmed that the waves appeared to be as tame as they would ever be this deep into open water. Still, Farrier was unsure whether attempting to land was a better gamble. If the impact of hitting the water didn’t wreck him completely the interior would more than certainly flood, and without quick rescue he would still be lost to the sea. There was no good choice. Collins had to go with his own instinct, and Farrier just had to hope for his sake that he chose right.

The fighter had joined with the Heinkel to escort it back toward the coast by the time he caught up to it, and peeled off the second he drew near enough to fire. Steering to keep it in his sightline, he drew alongside the other English plane – smoking in earnest now, the long plume white and thick as cloud.

“He’s turning tail, I’m going to get after him.”

“Good luck,” Collins said earnestly. “Watch your fuel, you’re at fifteen gallons.”

“Fifteen gallons, understood,” he replied, marking the new number on the matte black surface of the fuselage. It was an approximation at best, which Collins knew. Yet it spoke to the other man’s character that he took the extra seconds to give him the information in service of both mission and his fellow pilot. “Best of luck, Collins.”

He felt the frown pulling heavier at his brow as Collins’ plane sank lower and lower, smoke trailing in its wake.

“Collins, do you read?”

No answer came. Not even the sound of breathing, which almost made the suspense worse. He very much did not want to mourn another good man today, especially not one he might consider a friend.

He watched, his breath growing tight in his chest and tighter with every meter it dropped. While he was not much for religion, his pride was not so great that he couldn’t admit to having thought something like a prayer just before the dying plane hit the water with a burst of spray.

He twisted in his seat, trying to see, but unable to make out anything but the rough outline of the downed Spitfire bobbing atop the water. That, and the civilian boat they had flown over minutes before. A little fishing vessel cutting through the waves straight for the fallen plane. He had no time to stay and no way to make sure. The low, mournful drone of the German engines was dimming as they pulled farther away and he had a job to do. He just had to keep going and hope Collins survived.

With a wave of salute to cement that hope, he turned his attention back to the fighter and the ever growing thundercloud of black smoke curling over Dunkirk.

Farrier didn’t really fear death. Not out of any sense of pride or disdain for anything resembling cowardice – fearing death did not make a man a coward – he simply found it difficult to fear something as naturally a part of life as was birth just because he didn’t know what it looked like. Suffering and agony, maybe, but not death. Yet every soldier’s worst nightmare was to die in battle, and he was no exception. Not for the dying itself, but what the dying brought. The loss, the pain, the deep furrows of grief like those that had leeched the life from his own mother, never having recovered from losing his father.

He wondered if perhaps that was part of why he had put thoughts of tying himself to another person out of his mind so completely. If he cared for someone enough to marry them, why would he risk putting them through a loss like that?

The closer he had become to Ellie the more he had felt it: the looming threat of the war to come. It had been like the barrel of a rifle hovering somewhere behind his head, its presence made clear by the muted, hair-raising sound as it was cocked. He had warred with keeping his mouth shut, with removing himself from her life, because that surely would have been the good thing to do – the _right_ thing. But whether it made him a selfish, lovesick bastard, he hadn't been able to do it and not because he had felt as though he were running out of time and his chances with it. He had simply wanted to be with her, and she was the kind of woman you damn well married if you wanted to keep her. Or, rather, if you wanted _her_ to keep you.

_“Let me take you flying.”_

_Ellie’s eyes widened as she sipped at her whiskey. “Oh, no,” she laughed, shaking her head and setting the glass back down. “No.”_

_She looked especially pretty tonight for some reason, polished and dainty in the cream button blouse and dark blue skirt, her hair pinned back behind her right ear – every bit the classy, no-nonsense secretary for the prestigious barrister’s office. He’d been granted an extra night of leave and had been waiting to surprise her when she left work for the night. The look of stunned excitement on her face when she had stepped out with the other office girl and seen him had been so genuine that it had made his heart thump hard in his chest. He didn’t even care how ridiculous that probably was._

_“What are you doing here?” she’d asked, a little breathless. “I thought I wasn’t going to see you until next week.”_

_“Kidnapping you.” He had leaned down to kiss her cheek as she laughed, hand sliding around the curve of her waist to settle below her shoulder blades._

_Her eyes were bright and a little wicked as she’d smiled up at him. “Well, all right then, Lieutenant. You’d better lead on.”_

_It had been some weeks since their chance meeting, and he had lost track of how many evenings he had spent in her company. Enough to know that she was passionate and whip-smart, and could hold her booze better than most women he’d known. That she had a soft spot for long, romantic novels and sewed dresses on commission for a bit more money to save up – such as the wine-red velvet number that would forever have a fond place in his memory – and to donate to children’s homes with a need for as many extra clothes as they could come by. Enough to know that the more time he spent with her the more he wanted to spend._

_At the start of the evening they had been seated at opposite sides of the tiny corner table of the club, but gradually as time passed and food and liquor were consumed they had inched slowly closer to one another. Though he couldn’t remember having moved his chair, or she moving hers. But an hour or two later there they were, enveloped in the haze of cigarette smoke and close enough for their knees to touch._

_Food finished, he had angled his body toward her and laid his arm along the back of her chair as she told him about her somewhat hectic day, the better to watch the play of low light against the gold in her hair. He had rolled up his shirtsleeves some time ago, and the warmth of her sank into the skin of his forearm, the toe of her shoe brushing his ankle when she crossed her legs. It was deliciously intimate. He had found himself thinking that he could spend every night listening to her talk, watching the changing expressions flicker across her face, and be perfectly content._

_“Why not?” he asked now, his voice threatening to become lost amidst the continuous hum of laughter and conversation._

_The idea had come to him after she’d asked more about his work. The military aspects interested her much less. He gathered the only reason she had even asked his rank was out of respect, though she used it in the way of a playful pet-name of sorts. Which he had expected he wouldn’t particularly care for, but found that he did. She was, however, endlessly curious about what it was like to work with planes, about the mechanics and the art – her word, not his own – of flying. And he’d begun to toy with the thought of simply showing her._

_The military machines weren’t for casual use, it was true, but he had connections and access to private, civilian-owned planes he could borrow whenever he asked. It wasn’t something he would have normally considered. The flying certainly, there had been a time in his life where he would have spent all his time in the air if he could. But he had never thought to bring anyone else._

_Even if he had, most of the women with whom he’d had any sort of interaction lasting longer than a few minutes were more interested in the idea than the reality. They didn’t tend to be all that interested in knowing what he felt and enjoyed about being a pilot. They just thought it dashing that he was one. Which had been enough for his purposes, and theirs. But the more questions Ellie had asked, the more specific and in-depth she inquired, the more he’d found himself wanting to share that part of himself with her, though it had almost exclusively been a solitary one up to that point._

_“It’s perfectly safe.”_

_“I believe you,” she agreed, leaning back in her chair. “But no. I’ll keep my feet on the ground and my breakfast where it is, thank you.”_

_He couldn’t be sure what he enjoyed more about that statement; the humor and unabashed reference to vomiting, or the almost unthinking acknowledgement that she knew she would be safe with him. It felt a little juvenile, but it stoked his pride nonetheless._

_“You asked how it feels to be in the air,” he argued, “let me take you up, see for yourself. We’ll keep it low and easy. No evasion maneuvers, I promise.”_

_“Oh, so this_ isn’t _just an excuse to show off?”_

_He quirked a small, lopsided smile at her. “I didn’t say that.”_

_One slender brow rose in a playful arc. “Right. Well, you’ll have to find some other way to impress me out of my knickers, Mister Farrier, because I’m staying put.”_

_It had delighted him to discover that while she might look and sound like a prim city girl who’d never gotten a bit of dirt on her hands, she was real and earthy and just a little bit vulgar; which meant he was free to treat her like a woman, not some fancy, pristine lady that likely would have bored him silly right quickly._

_While he wasn’t necessarily going out of his way to act the gentleman with her – he had kissed her plenty and took every opportunity he could to touch her – he had made the effort to make sure she understood that he wasn’t there because he wanted a quick bit of skirt and nothing more after. But the more comfortable she became with him the more physically affectionate she was, the more sassy little quips like that began to sound like hints. Flirting in earnest rather than simply flashing her own wicked humor. And he was not going to sit there and pretend that he wasn’t panting after her like a boy fifteen years his junior._

_Doing his valiant best not to think about her in her underthings (and definitely_ not _out of them), he ignored the curl of heat in his gut at her banter. He did, however, allow himself to lift his hand from her chair back to play with a lock of her hair, knuckles brushing the smooth skin at the nape of her neck._

_“There anything that might change your mind?”_

_“About the flying?” she mused, coyly, “or my knickers?”_

_Christ, she was fucking delightful._

_“Let’s say both.”_

_Her only answer was to down the rest of her whiskey, a secretive little smile at her lips which made him itch to drag her into his lap and kiss her until she was gasping._

_The scuffle started just as they were getting up to leave. She hadn’t had a coat with her when he’d abducted her from the office so he had draped his suit jacket over her shoulders in case it was chilly out, and that was when he heard the scrape and clatter of chairs, the glass shatter against the floor._

_Turning he saw the two Army boys lunge at one another, knocking over a table and smashing a few plates in their clambering haste to settle whatever dispute had them so damn riled. A result of too much pride and too little sense, and_ far _too much alcohol. He would have left them to their fellows had said fellows been exerting more than the barest effort to break the stupid clods apart rather than goading them on._

_“Wait here,” he said to Ellie, pausing just enough to catch the alarm streaked across her face, stark and white._

_Weaving through the tables he made his way to the brawling soldiers, dodging a wayward elbow as he wedged himself between them._

_“That’s enough.”_

_Planting a hand on one man’s chest, he gripped the other by the collar to wrench him backward. The man in front of him was a bit taller, but he was skinny and probably had enough booze in him to drown a horse. When Farrier shoved him back more firmly he stumbled, staggering directly into one of his mates._

_“Either cool down or go sleep it off.”_

_The other solider twisted in his grasp and struck out, fist connecting with his ribs. Had the man been a little less intoxicated it might have done some damage rather than just smarting like the dickens for a moment, but it was just as irritating either way. Releasing the collar, he gripped the other man by the back of the head and under one flailing arm, wresting him down until the side of his face pressed flat against the nearest table._

_“That’s_ enough, _” he growled and lifted his gaze to the other Army boys gathered nearby. “You lot, back to barracks, now. Or your officers are going to be laying into your backsides tomorrow.”_

_He might not be an officer himself, but he didn’t need to be. Simply his natural bearing and knowing how to talk to them was enough reason to mind, let alone the threat of discipline. It would take work to get a hold of their superiors, but he could do it – and he would if they gave him cause. Not that it looked as though he would need to. They were already starting to clear out by the time he let up on the little shite that had swung on him._

_Ellie’s eyes were wide when he made his way back to her. She was looking at him oddly, with a mix of concern and something else he couldn’t quite decipher._

_“Are you…all right?”_

_“Fine,” he assured her with a nod. “Let’s go.” Laying a hand against her back he urged her gently toward the door._

_She was quiet during their walk, her hand gripping a little more tightly than usual where she held his arm. Clearly shaken. Not for the first time he wondered which of the men in her life had shown her violence. A father with a bad temper, maybe, who was loud and slammed doors and furniture when in a fit. Or a former sweetheart who drank too much or had put a hand to her once or twice because he’d thought he had a right to. Whichever it was, it didn’t take much to see that displays of aggression bothered her. They rather annoyed him too, truth be told. Which wasn’t to say he hadn’t been involved in his share of brawls in his younger years, but that time was behind him._

_Though he knew he wouldn’t have been able to, part of him rather wished he had left them to their squabbling. Fucking Army bastards._

_What was it that had frightened her, the fighting itself or that he’d gotten involved? And would that have been because she had been worried or because she believed his doing so indicated something she didn’t care for?_

_He didn’t tolerate mistreatment of women. Some of the flying corps had learned the hard way that this intolerance extended to certain talk as well and to watch their mouths if they wanted to avoid getting the living piss thrashed out of them. That said, he had never felt truly_ protective _of a woman before. Not in the way of wanting to shelter and soothe – or in the way of vowing to knock in the teeth of any man that so much as looked at her in a way he didn’t like, whether she was with him or not. He didn’t relish the idea that he might have inadvertently made her leery of him, but he wouldn’t blame her for a second if he had._

_He didn’t ask. He didn’t know how to reassure her in a way that didn’t sound like horseshite, or else that he was covering a lie, so he let the silence breathe. It was possible he was reading far too much into the whole thing, and if not then he would handle it then._

_He walked her to the corner as he usually did, out of sight from the front windows in case the landlady was the sort to protest her young, unmarried tenants being too familiar with their gentleman friends – as was more often the case in all-female establishments like this one. She turned to face him, hand sliding from the crook of his arm, gaze veiled as she moved to slip his jacket from her shoulders._

_“Keep it,” he told her, “I’ll get it from you next time.”_

_She lifted her face to look at him then, pretty blue eyes still bright with a bit of what he had thought to be wariness, but now…_

_“All right,” she murmured, a soft lilt to her voice reminiscent of a sigh. “Goodnight, then.”_

_She said it, but made no move to leave as she usually would after having bid him goodnight. She simply stood there, delicate as fawn in her shiny black heels, fingers curled into the light gray lapel of his jacket, and suddenly he wondered if he hadn’t been completely on the wrong track._

_Keeping a close watch for any hint to back off, he reached for her, cupping the side of her jaw with a hand as he took a step closer. He could see the breath hitch in her chest, feel it tremble in her throat._

_While, again, he hadn’t exactly been pretending he didn’t want to be, he had never really been overtly sexual with her either. He’d kept his hands to her waist and shoulders and mid-back even when he’d all but ached to follow the graceful dip a bit lower for a handful of her sweet little bottom. He’d kept any kissing to her face, and if they got a bit heated he kept himself firmly in check no matter how badly he wanted dip into her mouth and savor her like a good brandy. He couldn’t have said what was different tonight – only that it was. There was a charge between them, hot and electric, the magnetic pull he felt toward her near to crushing in force. She was looking at him like she wanted him to pick her up and carry her straight to his bed, and he caved like the desperate man she’d suddenly made him._

_Pulling her to him, he slanted his mouth firmly over hers. Her lips were already parted. It was easy to slip between them, easier still to revel in the soft little gasp she made when he licked into her mouth, darting quick and smooth and tasting the whiskey on her tongue._

_Lifting her arms to his chest, she rose up on her toes and arched her back. He sucked in a breath at the press of her body, supple and warm and bloody perfect. His hand twisted into her hair, the other sliding down over the curve of her waist to grip her by the backside as she squirmed and clutched at him, a panting moan slipping from her throat._

_God she was like something right out of a dirty dream, and he wanted nothing more than to push her back against the nearest wall and do things he should definitely_ not _do out in the middle of a public street._

_Taking one last lingering, open-mouthed kiss he pulled back to look at her._

_She looked dazed, her eyes half-lidded and dark. She was breathing as heavily as he was, her breasts rising and falling, enticing beneath her blouse, her lips reddened from the pressure of his mouth. Tension knotted in his stomach, and if he hadn’t already been harder than steel piling, he was then._

_“Should I apologize for that?” he asked, voice rough to his own ears._

_“Are you sorry?”_

_“No.” Because he wasn’t, not even a little, and he suspected she didn’t want him to be._

_Her smile was equal parts sweet and beguiling and he desperately wanted to take that lush lower lip between his teeth. “I told you you’d have to find something else,” she told him with a hint of mischief, and for a moment he was utterly stumped as to what she was talking about, fighting to make sense of anything over the urgent demand of his cock._

_Then, after a moment, their dinner conversation drifted back to him._

_“What—putting a few pongos in their place?”_

_“Maybe that,” she mused, “or maybe finally kissing me like you mean it.”_

_His blood went hot at the implication that she had been waiting for him to do something about wanting her instead of just hinting that he’d like to._

_“Did you not think I meant it?”_

_Her palms smoothed down his chest, slow and perhaps a little teasing. “No,” she said after a moment, “only…” Her smile faded a bit then, her focus dropping to where her hands rested. She appeared to be contemplating, struggling with something it seemed that she didn’t want to say but felt she should._

_“What’s wrong, dove?”_

_The endearment slipped out completely of its own volition but it never occurred to him to retract it. It had felt natural, and thus was clearly meant to be spoken._

_“Just that—”_

_She sighed shortly, as if annoyed with herself._

_“I’m not a virgin,” she said then, plain and matter of fact, but with a tone of resignation that said she expected it to put him off – not something that shamed her, but that she expected_ he _might think she_ should _be ashamed of._

_He hadn’t really thought about it, not directly. But considering now, he had never really expected her to be. He had assumed she’d had at least one man before he had come along, and naturally assumed what came along with that – because how could any man with even a passing interest in women not want to get his hands on her if he could? Outside of the little pang of envy for the idea of that other man, it truly didn’t bother him. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t had his share of women, after all._

_There was an irony to it: that the one woman he had been going out of his way to show respect may have interpreted that respect as an indication of his having a very specific impression of her. She had never been meek or mousy in his company, but it was possible she might have thought he would expect her to be a proper little English rose underneath her spirit – all quiet obedience and maidenly virtue. She might have thought upon discovering that she’d fooled around with someone else before he would become disappointed, even disgusted._

_A small part of him wanted to be affronted by this, but he supposed he couldn’t blame her when it was a sentiment shared by many, and loudly so, that such behavior would mean a woman was decidedly less than decent and should be treated as such._

_“I don’t give a toss what you aren’t,” he said frankly, pleased to see her face flush with gentle pleasure at what might have been the best line he’d ever come up with – though he had meant every word._

_Cupping her chin, he ran the edge of his thumb along the curve of her mouth and did absolutely nothing to prevent his brain from considering all the possible ways he could take that look and turn it into an entirely different kind of pleasure._

_“So you want me in your knickers, then?”_

_Face contorting with a mix of amusement and mock-anger she slapped a hand against his chest. “_ Yes, _you absolute arse,” she snapped, all bristle and ruffled feathers, but she softened like silk when he gathered her close and swept the hair back from her shoulder to bare the side of her neck and lower his mouth to her skin._

_She always smelled so damn good, like lilac water and bergamot, light, earthy, and a little fruity, as if she would taste sweet were he to attempt it._

_“Now?” he clarified, the desire in his veins surging with satisfaction to feel the flutter of her pulse at the rumble of his voice against her throat._

_“Yes,” she breathed on a whimper and he nodded, lips skimming up the curve of her neck to her ear._

_“Is there a way up?”_

_He was hoping for a fire escape or some other means of access. He’d done his share of sneaking around the stern, disapproving matrons who saw themselves as defenders of good Christian morals and protectors of chastity for the innocent, impressionable girls under their roofs. For her he would have faced the most hardened old battle axe head on and taken his licks, but it would certainly be easier – and more pleasant – to be a bit more discreet._

_“Mm,” Ellie sighed, “no, just come in the front.”_

_If she felt his surprise in the slight pause before he pressed the kiss to her temple she didn’t hint at it. “You won’t be in trouble with…?”_

_“Only if we get caught.”_

_“That likely?”_

_She gave an unladylike snort that he found irresistibly charming. “No. Mrs. Harding is always in her room by nine on the dot whether there are girls still about or not. She’ll screech at me if she finds out, but she won’t evict me. Not when I’m paying her extra on top of rent every month.”_

_Well thank Christ for Mrs. Harding and her less than rigorous guardianship of maidenly virtue._

_Angling her head away from his wandering mouth she gripped him by the elbow and towed him up the narrow steps to the boarding house door._

_The journey through the front hall and up the stairs to the second floor was neither particularly long nor difficult. It was only that it felt that way when having to focus on being quiet rather than on the hips of the woman leading him up. He was sure they’d been caught when a door creaked as they reached the landing and a face peered out from one of the nearby rooms; but rather than the matron it was another of the tenants, a tall, curvy brunette who gave him a curious glance. Shooting a wink at Ellie, who waved, she smiled and ducked back into her room. Which seemed a clear enough indication their sneaking would go unreported._

_Her room was small and simple, but clean, and much nicer than his quarters on station grounds. She eased the door closed behind him, sliding the bolt into place, and before he was entirely conscious of it he was snaking an arm around her middle and drawing her back against him._

_A soft sound of amused surprise left her as her shoulders met his chest, her hand finding his where it slid across her ribs. He pressed his face into soft, sweet-smelling hair and breathed, drinking in her nearness, the shape and warmth of her. Trying to get a rein on the desire clawing like a wrathful badger at his insides and putting the fine tremor in his hands._

_He didn’t think he’d ever wanted a woman so badly in his life, but like sodding goddamn hell was he going to just toss her up against the wall and fuck her with all her clothes still on. At least not this time, anyway. Considering the way she’d melted into his rather crass groping on the street she might not mind so much._

_There was a smile in the peal of her laugh when he nuzzled his way to her ear, nudging the shell of it with the tip of his nose before angling his head down to worry at the lobe with his mouth. His other hand curved around her, reaching for the front of her blouse. She let him slip the buttons free, one after another, but it was she who reached around to the back of her skirt to slide down the zipper and send it pooling to the floor at her feet._

_Stepping away from him, she slipped off the blouse, leaving her in a set of delicate peach-pink underthings and sheer silk stockings. A wide strip of skin was left bare below the band of the brassiere, pale and inviting. She turned to him, smiled._

_“Clothes off, soldier.”_

_Though not the type to buck orders, he didn’t recall ever being quite so eager to follow one._

_He all but tore at his shirt in his haste to undress, obliging her down to his own underwear. He wasn’t lean and trim as was considered popularly attractive – the way of the men in cinema. He was solid with a heavy frame, broad in the chest and shoulders, and the only thing trim about him was the narrowing of his waist and hips. His lack of concern about this was swiftly validated as she followed his movements with heat dark in her eyes, little white teeth biting enticingly at her lip._

_Unable to stand not touching her a second longer, he grabbed for her. Looping an arm under her bottom he lifted her right off the floor – which elicited a startled squeal – and laid her down across the neat little bed in the corner._

_Her hands cupped his face, her lips finding his, and the world tilted drunkenly around him. For a while he stayed there: bent over her, running his hands up and down the curves and dips of her, relishing the hot, slippery silk of her tongue. It felt delightfully wicked to do it, necking in their unmentionables like a couple of randy kids. He would have been content to do no more than that, in spite of the insistent ache in his groin, but Ellie, it seemed, was not. Seemingly annoyed at his easy pace, s_ _h_ _e arched her spine like a cat and pushed with her hips, the result a deep, rough groan as it brought a sweet pressure to the cock swollen and stiff in his briefs._

_She was panting lightly when he pulled back to look at her, her pupils blown wide and her lips glossy, red-gold hair tousled and mussed about her head in the perfect picture of debauchery. Bloody hell, but she was beautiful like this – all breathless and longing._

_His hand followed the curve of her hip down, fingertips grazing the bare flesh high at her thigh in search of the fastenings of her garters. Then, sliding between fine, iridescent silk and skin soft and pale as buttermilk he rolled the stockings down and cast them to the floor, taking generous moments to follow the long sleek line of her legs back up._

_Age had made him patient, allowed him the control to savor things younger men might have rushed in their eagerness to get to a finish line that wasn’t near as satisfying as the journey getting there. He didn’t want to rush with her. He wanted to take his time, wanted to make her former lover – whoever he was – look like the clumsy, stupid prick he must have been to have let her go. Perhaps most selfishly, he wanted her to never want him too far from her bed._

_Bending his head, he brushed his lips across the silky skin of her chest. “What do you want?”_

_The satin of her brassiere warmed swiftly as he pressed his lips to the underside of one breast, mouth open, hot and unhurried. Her hands slid dazedly across his back, fingers curling against his skin. He could see her nipples through the fabric, beaded tight and pleading for touch, and he set his tongue to one, stroking through the fine cloth until it was damp and clinging and she was squirming with a whimper._

_“Ellie,” he called softly, reaching behind her for the clasp of the bra. “What do you want, dove?”_

_“You,” she breathed, and he had to clamp down hard on the wild, immensely stupid part of his mind gone half frantic at the idea of burying himself inside her._

_Ragged apology in his voice, he shook his head: “I don’t have a rubber.”_

_This was a horrendous oversight on his part that would be remedied as soon as physically possible. For now, though, it meant that he wouldn’t be doing anything that might end with getting her pregnant. That was not a line he was willing to cross. But there were plenty of other things he could do – each more enticing than the last._

_The catch came free with a tiny snap of elastic and he splayed his fingers wide across her naked back for a luxurious moment before resuming the task of removing the garment. She helped him by sliding the straps down her arms so he could hook a finger through one and toss it away, baring pert, perfect breasts. He had the vague thought that he should push her for an answer, not wanting to do something she didn’t want him to, but he was more confident than not that she would tell him if he did. He certainly hoped so, for all it took was one look at the blush-pink color of those sweet little nipples and he lost all goddamn sense._

_Closing his mouth around one he teased at it, the hot surge of need in his gut clenching as her hand came up to cradle the back of his head. Gentle nails scraped along his scalp as her fingers curled into his hair and she sighed._

_He worked at the panels of the girdle, pulling open the clasps and folding the stiffened satin away until he could slide it out from under her, freeing the soft, graceful curve of her waist. The slope of her belly was smooth and warm beneath his palm before skin disappeared under cloth. Delicate lace trimmed the bottom hem – a soft rasp against the inside of his wrist as he dipped his hand into the crease where she was squeezing her thighs together._

_He could feel her, hot and so wet she was soaking through the fabric. His exhale was heavy against the soft rise of her breast._

_“Ellie…?” It was a broken fragment of a question, both a request for permission or for the command that he stop._

_She wriggled, and it took him a few seconds and lifting his head to glance down in order to realize she had tucked her other hand into the waistband of her knickers and was trying to shove them down. Gripping the elastic, he pulled for her until he could slide them down her legs._

_He gazed down at her, letting his eyes roam over all her silky pale skin, the coppery thatch of soft curls at the juncture of her legs, hinting at what he was certain would be the prettiest quim he had ever seen – taking in just what a lucky bastard he truly was. Propping himself up to watch her, he hooked a slender ankle with one foot, coaxing her to part her thighs just a little. She did so, soft little hand clutching at his chest as he delved into the slick heat of her._

_“Ah—“ she gasped, her back bending in a helpless arch as he stroked her, taking selfish measure of just how wet she was for him. So wet it was making him lightheaded, reducing him to a haze of nothing but hot skin and hunger._

_The gentle petting wasn’t what she wanted. She seemed to like it well enough, but he wasn’t going to be satisfied until he had her trembling and crying out and mindless with pleasure. He adjusted, creating a cradle with his fingers – index and ring parting slick, swollen folds and holding her there, leaving the middle free to graze between. She shuddered and spread her thighs wider, making the most delicious keening moan._

_He teased her, drawing slow circles over the tight bud at the crest of her, sliding down and back up the length of her opening and absorbing the strain wracking her face, the needy little sounds she made, the uncontrollable jerks of her hips, all the while doing his best not to think about the uncomfortable pressure in his gut and groin. Thinking about it would only make him think about how desperately he wanted to sink into her tight, hot little cunt and fuck her like a stag in rut._

_Oh, bloody buggering_ shite.

_He pulled his hand away, sliding from the bed and her luscious little body. She rose up on her elbows, curious rather than concerned to she watch him move to kneel on the coarse carpeting at the foot of the bed. He suddenly realized that this might not be something she had experienced before – which both baffled him and elicited an almost feverish triumph to be the one to introduce her to this particular pleasure._

_Reaching, he filled his hands with the flesh of her backside and dragged her down the length of the bed until her tailbone met the edge, chuckling in spite of himself at her undignified squeak of surprise. At least until he looked down and saw her, soft, pink and glistening. The scent of her was utterly overwhelming, musky and sweet and drugging._

_His mouth was watering. He wanted to_ devour _her, and that was exactly what he was going to do. Until she either told him to stop or she was a limp, thoroughly satisfied heap of woman._

_He tucked himself between her thighs, tilting his head to press a soft, lingering kiss to the fine, tender skin at the inside of one. There was a hint of something in her eyes as she watched him. A dawning understanding coupled with disbelief. He smiled, at once promise and reassurance, just before he lowered his head and licked greedily into the heat of her._

_“James…” she breathed, the foreign and yet familiar syllables turned to magic on her tongue._

_People didn’t call him James. His mother and brother had called him Jim, and for that reason alone he didn’t like anyone else using it even if he hadn’t hated the nickname – which he did. Friends and colleagues, stumped at his firm rejection of any paring down simply called him Farrier, or else Jack, for no reason other than someone had said it once by mistake and it had stuck as something of a joke. While he didn’t conceal it from them, other women didn’t tend to use it. Either forgetting or due to some other reason, he really didn’t care. She was the only one who consistently addressed him by his name._

_He liked it._

_“Uhhn…_ James _—”_

_She shuddered. An internal thing, not of the flesh but of those tiny, seemingly so delicate muscles strong enough to grip a man to the point of tears. He thrust his tongue into her, wet siding on wet, and her hips moved with him. He had not a single thought in his head of holding her down._

_It wouldn't have mattered. Of that much he was beyond any doubt. He would have coaxed and gentled and instructed and been pleased as punch, but he was not above acknowledging how nice it was not to have to tiptoe his way with a virgin. Ellie was neither fearful nor ashamed of her own body or her own desires. She was responsive and genuine; a right lusty little thing and he was absolutely gone for her. Her thighs were trembling, squeezing at his shoulders, heel digging into his back below the shoulder blade as she rocked herself against him. One hand was tangled in the bedding. The other, he could tell just from sound, was pressed tight over her mouth to muffle her cries._

_He was thrusting instinctively, reflexively, unable to keep from grinding his hips into the side of the bed in the unconscious effort to relieve some of the throbbing demand of his own arousal. It wasn’t enough. The need was too sharp, too intense, and he was fumbling with his underwear, yanking them down around his thighs and grunting as he took himself in hand._

_He hooked the other arm under and around her bent thigh, flattening his palm against her lower belly. Setting his thumb to her clit he drew tight, quick circles and sank into the harsh, strangled sound of her pleading whimper as he fisted his cock. Long, sure strokes quickly spiraled into a ragged, uneven rhythm as his bollocks drew tight._

_Half mad with the need to hear her unravel he switched tactics, sealing his mouth over the sensitive little bud and pressing with a finger, sliding into the tight, silken channel that clamped instantly,_ fiercely _, down on him._

 _He groaned and bucked into his own hand, squeezing harshly at the base to control the spill of ejaculation as the pleasure slammed into him with the concussive force of a collision. And thank god the vibration of the sound tipped her over. She writhed: a strangled, broken cry trapped in her throat as she convulsed around his finger in a molten rush of liquid heat, and he couldn’t bring himself to care that he had just thoroughly soiled the front of his briefs because she was bloody_ glorious. _He only regretted not having seen her face contort as she’d come._

_Tucking himself back in his underthings he ran a palm up the length of her thigh. His own legs were about as steady as a newborn colt when he rose and returned to the bed, wiping absentmindedly at his chin._

_Ellie was sprawled like something half Bernini classic and half pornography, her eyes closed in her ecstasy and leaving him to admire unnoticed. Her arms were thrown over her head and her chest heaving, nipples still drawn tight and her legs seeming to go on for forever and a day. Her cheeks flushed, lip bitten as red as if she’d painted it. He stretched out beside her, arm curving around her slender waist to pull her flush against him and lowering his head to kiss her, a coil of base pleasure twitching in his cock at the dart of her tongue – tasting herself on his lips. He was already well on his way to working on another erection, and she was going to be the death of him._

_“Next time,” she all but purred, draping an arm over his shoulder and a leg over his knee and giving him a look that was pure sex, “I want you inside me.”_

_And it would be his absolute pleasure to oblige._

_Hellfire._

_How was it possible that no one had snapped up this fierce little beauty and dragged her in front of a priest by now? And how on earth had he managed to play his cards right not only to find her but to actually convince her to give him a shot? Fuck, he didn’t care. For as long as she wanted him, she was his. That was all that mattered._

_Her hand slipped down the surface of his chest to rest there, just over his heart. It was an openly affectionate touch, sweet and little wistful._

_“I should go,” he told her, though all he really wanted to do was lay his head back and doze there with her for the rest of the night. An idea which had never felt comfortable about with anyone else. With her it felt natural. It just made sense._

_She sighed, nuzzling against the hollow of his throat. “All right.”_

_It had been a painful process, gathering and getting back into his clothes. Especially when she rose and shimmied into a nightdress that draped her like liquid sin and cupped her breasts in sheer lace and it had been literally all he could do not to hurl himself at her like a starving dog. She kissed him goodnight, cradling his face between her hands and tracing his mouth with soft, lingering lips._

_No one stirred as he crept down the hall and stairwell to slip outside. No eyes followed him. He was alone with his jacket that hugged too warm and not warm enough, and the unhappy knowledge that he wouldn’t see her again for a full week. It felt like torture._

That had been the point where he started to feel possessive, when he’d started thinking of her as his and himself as hers. Not long after had come the thoughts of marriage and with them the harrowing realization that he had gotten far too deep at the worst possible time.

He had taken her somewhere fancy that night, with expensive wine and rich food and dancing since, for whatever reason, she enjoyed doing so with him regardless of his lack of skill because she was lovely and gracious – and probably found it amusing. He hadn’t been planning on asking anything, he had just wanted to spoil her. And he supposed it might have been the setting, maybe the music or the way he had held her as though subconsciously afraid of losing her.

Their joined hands had been tucked in close to their bodies as they swayed in a slow, easy circle, and all he could think about was how much he wanted the moment to last. How much he wanted to find a nice little house and spend the rest of his life in it with her just like this. But he couldn’t have that unless he married her. As little as he cared about the complete tripe that was _propriety_ , even in this modern time he couldn’t subject her to the kind of slander and abuse that would haunt her for living with a man to whom she wasn’t legally bound. But if he bound her to him in that way and Britain issued an order to Germany to desist as whispers were hinting was likely to happen…

Either way he risked losing her. Hell, he hadn’t even known if marriage was something she wanted, let alone with him.

He remembered lowering his face to her hair to breathe her in, his lips against her temple. He thought he might have been steeling himself to tell her they had to stop, that he couldn’t in good conscience keep seeing her this way, but what came out of his mouth was quite different.

"I want to marry you."

Drawing back she had peered up at him with wide blue eyes, obviously taken aback.

“Isn't it a little soon?” she asked, because, it seemed, she hadn’t been sure what else to say to a statement that wasn’t a question and had been phrased like a confession.

“Maybe,” he’d admitted, “but I know what I want.”

Touched affection softened her face, but the tiny frown remained creased between her brows. “Then…why does it sound like you’re trying to talk yourself out of it?”

His admission came then that it was no real marriage he offered her but a gamble, and with the blatant truth that he wasn’t sure he could handle the prospect of her becoming a widow almost as soon as she spoke her vows.

“If I were going to marry someone,” she had said to him in that calm, thoughtful way she had after some contemplation, “it would have to be you, or no one at all. And if I lost you…then at least I would have had you for as long as I could.”

For long moments he had been unable to do more than continue to sway with her, throat locked tight as though a fist had wrapped around his windpipe. It had been, for a second, difficult to breathe for the sheer power of the emotion flooding him – elation and fear and near-to-painful _yearning_. He was about half convinced they were speaking in hypotheticals, but the ferocity with which he had reacted to her words, the almost-nauseous pitching of his stomach…he had to know.

“So you will?”

The look she gave him was of exasperated affection. “I’m completely in love with you, you daft man. Yes, I’ll marry you.”

Stunned, heart throbbing against his ribs, he had tightened his grip about her waist, pressing her closer. “Isn’t it rather soon to say you love me?” he echoed, elated when she answered by tipping back her head and giving a hearty, full-throated laugh.

Her hand, resting light at his shoulder, had curved around the back of his neck, which she used to pull his face down to hers.

“Stop being such a prat, James,” was her whisper right before she’d kissed him.

He had known right then that he loved her too.

She could have done so much better than him. He was, as she had noted herself, gruff and blunt-edged and more than a bit coarse. He was not well-spoken, not romantic (a point which she argued profusely and to her own amusement), and not all that exciting. He wasn’t even an officer, just a pilot of middling rank who happened to have a little skill, while she was bright and passionate and could have had any life she wanted. But he never questioned her choice. He was a creature of the earth as much as the air, and even before she became Eleanor Farrier, née Burton, she had been the ground beneath his feet.

Then the war had come knocking.

(*)

He dogged the German fighter like a terrier with a rat: darting in, trailing close, and snapping whenever an opening presented itself. The other pilot was a skilled flier. It took intense focus, quick reflexes, and more than a few tricks to keep from being shaken off.

The fighter swept into a sharp, tight corkscrew to evade him, water and sky spinning around as he followed right on its tail.

 _"There's something magical about it,"_ Ellie had told him once after watching some of his drills from the ground. _"The way you move up there—it's like a dance, like birds. It's lovely to watch."_

He thought he might have understood some of what she meant as he echoed each roll and weave the German pilot made. It was rather like a kind of dance. Though in this setting it was less the sort with a partner and more that of adversaries facing off; waiting to see who would make the first blow, who would land a strike, who would back off first. It far more aggressive than what she had seen, cutting sharply through the air rather than drifting in harmony with it. They climbed and banked and drove relentlessly southeast, and though he was quick on the trigger – and far more than usual – the wily fighter continued to evade him.

They had been up amidst a thick swath of cloud for a few moments, the ethereal whiteness curling lazily against the wings, sun glinting bright off sleek metal bodies. Emerging on the other side, he could finally make out the beach – a sprawling dark shape hugging the curve of the horizon and haloed in smoke.

There were boats in the water, more than he’d expected to find. And not just Naval vessels but civilian ones, many far too small to have been commandeered in the hopes of rescuing as many of the cornered troops as possible. That would have to mean that they hadn’t been dispatched officially. They were instead there by virtue of the people from Dover, Dorset, and the other surrounding coastal towns. Sailing into bombing and gunfire across the Channel for their sons and brothers – to bring their boys home.

As he’d suspected, the H-11 had been heading back to shore. Unfortunately, he hadn’t caused enough damage to ground the damn thing. Doubly unfortunate: it didn’t appear to be going for the beach itself, but rather for the boats. That would have been what it was doing so far out, he realized – sweeping the water for Allied ships to sink. Why spend time and ammunition on cornered soldiers, after all. Far better to target the vessels sent to carry them to safety. The added benefit to which would be putting another solid dent in the enemy’s Navy. To say nothing of morale.

As much as this strategic logic and the fierce inclination to go to the aid of his fellows in the water would have had him abandoning the fighter in favor of prioritizing the far greater threat the Heinkel posed, he couldn’t. The bomber wouldn’t come at him. It would stick to its task of sinking the boats. On his own, with no one to keep the second plane off his back and his fuel dwindling with every second, he had had no choice but to keep his course. He couldn’t take care of the bomber if the fighter struck him out of the air before he could.

With grim persistence and sheer, rigid tenacity he kept after the fighter, angling to follow when it began to ascend again in effort to lose him.

The next time he fired, he did not miss.

Instantly the German plane began to drop, gushing smoke as it tipped nose down toward the water. He didn’t watch it fall.

The smoke-blackened beaches were behind him now, the H-11 a dark shape caught in his rearview mirror, zeroing in on the Naval ship below like some great predatory bird. His eyes dropped to his broken fuel gauge, to the last numbers he had hastily recorded between the dials. To the watch at his strap.

He had been more fortunate than many. Luck had kissed his cheek many times over through the better part of the last few months alone. While he never counted on it, never went into any skirmish without the firm certainty that it might be his last, he had never felt quite as sharply as he had today that his luck was slipping like sand through his fingers with every passing second.

Get out to the evacuation point. Provide as much air support and cover fire as possible. Get back.

Their orders had been very specific: they were not to stay. They were not to engage beyond the point where return was no longer possible and add to what would already be a colossal loss.

All he had to do was keep his nose facing forward, let the air and the plane carry him back across the water. It was what he’d been meant to do. Yet his hand was motionless upon the throttle, his eyes flicking back and again to the gray expanse of shore, to the ship bearing wounded and exhausted men who would be staring up in horror at the metal beast coming to send them to an ocean grave.

How was he supposed to make that choice? How could he simply leave them to that terror, that dawning, choking dread - to chaos and pain and an awful, agonizing death - when he had the power to change it?

Many men had died today, and many more would follow. Those that remained would be taken prisoner, fated to suffer torture and misery at enemy hands all the while longing for the mercy of death. He knew this. Just as he knew that if he stayed he forfeited all chance of getting back home again. He was just one man. It would be easy to say he had done his duty, retreat as commanded, continue on to the next fight. But it was a decision he would carry with him forever. He wasn’t sure he could bear the weight.

At the end of the day this war wasn’t about nations or the quarrels between them. It wasn’t about armies or pride or a victory that would feel as empty as a dry riverbed if it ever came. It was about people: men and women and children, and a future for those yet unborn, about life and decency and freedom. It was about what was right. One man was enough to save more. That, to his mind, was right.

And knowing it was its own, special kind of hell.

Almost as if in last-ditch effort to save itself, his mind conjured the face of the woman he loved and had found too late. Just as she had been the last time he’d seen her.

The warmth of summer had lingered in those first few days of September. Golden sunlight had turned her into something nearly luminous. A light to guide him home, he remembered thinking.

“Go,” she had said, hand soft and a little dry against his cheek, “fly safe. I’ll be right here when you get back.”

She hadn’t told him to come home.

He could make no promises, and she wouldn’t beg one of him. They both knew that her words were shaped around an _if_ that neither of them could speak, and he had heard what she didn’t say aloud, standing there in the garden surrounded by growing things. That she would either see him there or she would see him in heaven, should such a thing exist.

Ellie had not cried and pleaded. She had not raged. She knew the man she had married, and wouldn’t ask him to be anything but what he was. Which was how he knew she would never be angry with him for doing what he was doing now. She had already forgiven him any pain he might bring her when she let him slip the ring onto her finger, and he adored her for it beyond any form of description.

He had almost begun to believe he might make it through. That maybe all his caution and fear would turn out to be for nothing – something to look back on and smile about with every recollection of that bungled farce of a proposal. He had done his best to keep it from taking on the radiance of hope, for hope could easily become a weapon turned upon the mind that gave birth to it. Judging by the searing twist of pain in his chest, he had failed.

It would have been one thing to be shot down, to have his fate set for him beyond his ability to control. Being forced to choose this, _choose_ to give over what chance he did have of seeing her again was far worse.

He might have felt many things had he allowed himself to: anger or fear, regret, sorrow and loss. But he hadn’t the luxury for any of those things just now. He had to be cold, or else he wouldn’t be able to do what he must. Stay. And almost certainly die.

He watched the water tip to the right as he guided the Spitfire into the 180 degree turn, a rolling blue-gray mass that seemed to stretch on for eternity. The resignation settled over him; smooth, and almost calm, as he put his back to safe harbor. If this was to be his end, then he was going to damn well make it count.

Grip tightening at the levers, thumb poised upon the trigger, he charged straight for the bomber.

He just managed to gain on it when he caught the glint from another fighter in his mirror, swooping down from the rear. Unwilling to give up his ground on the bomber unless he absolutely had to, Farrier wove tight and uneven from side to side to evade any potential gunfire while remaining firmly on target, all the while keeping one eye on the plane at his back.

He wasn’t able to get to the Heinkel before it began its assault. He was gaining, but it was already right over the ship, water bursting in great fountainous sprays with every bomb that dropped.

As he circled above he could make out the dirty gray smoke plume from the port side, the great inky cloud beginning to spread from what was most definitely an oil leak. A leak that big and that quick could only mean severe structural damage. Sure enough the ship began to list onto its side, hemorrhaging oil. Capsizing as he looked on. Men were flinging themselves from the railing in vain, desperate grasp for safety. The ones on the surface might have a chance, but the ones below decks were almost certainly doomed to drown.

Poor unlucky bastards.

A hollow pang of hopelessness sank like heavy stones in his gut. If he had only been able to get there faster. If he hadn’t taken so bloody long making up his damn mind…but he knew better than this. He could blame himself until he was blue in the face and choking on his curses but it wouldn’t change the fact that he might have saved this ship and lost another. He might just as easily have been struck down before he turned back. There was no certainty here. Not that this made him feel the sting of this failure, his or not, any less keenly.

A sharp turn and some clever maneuvering got him around the enemy fighter and he shot it swiftly down – eviscerating the engines – before setting back to the bomber.

He was going to sink that miserable pile of tin straight to hell if it took everything he had.

Once more he banked and looped to come up on the larger plane’s rear. A hammer of the tail guns forced him to dodge, a few shots coming close enough to spike his pulse and set his teeth on edge. He refused to back off. Not even when a lucky bullet grazed him right below a front corner of the canopy, striking sparks. Even as he rolled to avoid the gunfire he remained resolutely in pursuit, unflinching, staring down his sights and waiting for that one clean shot.

_There._

The pad of his thumb slammed down. A rapid volley of bullets burying themselves into first one, then the second engine in a coughing bloom of smoke and the piercing whine of machinery.

His exhale was a vengeful, biting thing. An ugly triumph that his more brutish creature-instincts gave into for a split second before the emptiness, the waste of it, flooded back. Then he remembered the dark pool of oil in the water, the men floundering in it, flailing to the safety of the nearest other boat.

The shattered engines of the falling plane, smoking, still hot.

The payload of explosives.

Flame erupted the second the bomber struck the water. It spread, unfurling across the surface in a blazing, brilliant rush of yellow and orange that licked greedily at the air above. He could only imagine the screams. The grating, tearing shrieks of the men streaked with oil, trapped within the bed of fire as it devoured them alive with nowhere to run.

And there was nothing he could do.

It was a small comfort that the smaller boats at least were clear of danger. But so small that he hardly felt it over the draping shroud of a horror he knew would never fully leave him.

Forget sending any enemy plane to hell. This _was_ hell: the currency of war paid in blood and charred flesh and the screams of dying men. It was fire rippling along on the surface of the sea. It was smoke black as tar smeared across the horizon, and columns of soldiers too numerous to count like ants in neat rows striping the beach sand, drifting out into the shoals hoping desperately to be saved.

(**)

He soared above them, following the dip and curve of the shoreline. He surveyed the shapes atop the water, uneven, scattered, and far more numerous than expected: from the sizeable naval ships to tiny civilian skiffs. Which were coming and which were going, he couldn’t say. And while there would never be enough time or enough boats to get every man to safety, they were still going to try. They would retrieve as many as they could – hopeless cause be damned.

This was the country he was willing to give his life for. These steadfast, tireless, stubborn people. War would never be worth the price it exacted, but this…he could die for this and be at peace.

He made it to the southernmost end of the beach when his fuel finally ran out with the guttural clunk of engines trying to turn without anything to power them. The propellers slowed and stopped. The Spitfire choking its determined last before it stalled, and finally died. Gently, he eased the plane into a careful turn, pulling slowly back around.

He was still in the air. His work was not yet done.

No sooner had he put the beach to his other shoulder then he saw the approaching fighter. He could hear the droning of its engine over the deadened silence of his own, broken only by his breath. Steady, sure. In and out.

Forward he glided, certain that every second was going to be his last. The other pilot would see him and evade, and unable to do anything but steer side to side, he would be able to do nothing to protect himself. But in one last, nigh-to-miraculous stroke of luck the fighter didn’t so much as waver. It dove straight for the mole, for the soldiers ducking low upon the boards and cramming themselves against the beams.

His shots pierced deep into metal flesh. The enemy plane stuttered, went spiraling into the sea.

His breath left him in a slow, wavering rush.

After a moment he became aware of the sound, a low hum as if from a great distance. Blinking, he glanced down.

The soldiers on the beach were cheering. Dirty, sweat-streaked faces were tipped up to watch as he soared above their heads. They cheered and yelled and tossed helmets, waving their arms in feverish exaltation of a shared victory and the surge of energy that followed escape from near-death. It didn’t matter if that victory was as fleeting as the coming sunset, it was just as tangible and real.

They could have their moment of celebration. If he had bought them nothing else but that and a ragged scrap of hope, then it was enough. He had shielded them for as long as he could. But now his time was up.

With every second he was drifting lower, the flat, even stretch of beach drawing ever closer.

Automatically he reached to push open the top panel of the canopy and air rushed into the cockpit – cool and brisk, smelling of sea and salt. He lingered there for a moment, deliberating, enjoying the open air. The sun was approaching the horizon to the east, washing the shallows in a rosy golden glow. After a moment more he reached to shove the panel shut again. He wouldn’t be jumping. Whether by landing or crash, he would finish the mission inside his plane. Just as he’d begun it.

He could make out the whorled patterns in the sand now, the iridescent ribbons of water left by low tide, and the frost of green capping the rolling dunes, the smoke-hazed hills beyond. It was a soft, serene kind of beauty, filled with the hushed kind of quiet found only in the wake of chaos.

The mechanism to engage the landing gear had been damaged, which required him to manually crank the lever and lower the wheels one incremental centimeter at a time, grunting with the effort.

The ground rushed up to meet him, blurring brown and gold. Yet while the day had been a tangle of losses, of one thing going more wrong than the last, his hardy little vessel proved true to the last. He landed with a dip, a gentle bump, and a smooth flurry of sand – as flawless a landing as if he were in a perfect, undamaged plane with a runway beneath him instead of the edge of a beach.

When it slowed to a stop, nose wedging up into the side of a shallow dune, he laid a hand against the fuselage; offering gratitude to the stalwart piece of engineering and those that had built it. Both of whom had seen him safely this far. _Thank you, friend,_ he thought, _and goodbye._ Then he clambered out onto the wing, dropping to the sand. He took nothing with him – no kit or supplies. No weapon. Only the flare gun.

Taking aim, he fired the flare directly into the cockpit, lingering only long enough to see it burst and catch. _He_ might not have a choice, but he would not allow his plane to fall into enemy hands. Loyal and beloved as any friend, it was far better to put it down as he might a wounded and dying companion, rather than see it stripped and repurposed and turned upon the people it had fought for.

Tossing the gun itself back inside, he turned, and climbed down from the dune.

He took a few steps toward the water, stripping off the flight helmet and oxygen mask and closing his eyes, tipping his face up toward the sinking sun. Stretching his tired back and limbs, he breathed in the briny smell of ocean, savored the breeze drying the sweat damp in his hair, soaked into his clothes. The most basic, elemental pleasures of being alive. Of freedom while he had it.

There would be enemy soldiers combing the hills for stragglers and deserters. He could head inland, wander about until they found him, or he could hunker down here and attempt to hide. But he would do neither.

Gradually the sun sank touched the horizon, casting deep shadows across the beach. With his back to the waves he watched as flames engulfed the machine that had carried him, and waited for them to come.

His mind was strangely calm in those moments. He thought of his father suffocating on mustard gas, trying to breathe while his lungs shriveled and burned as he died in the trenches of another war. He thought of his brother: somewhere off in Africa the last he'd heard, almost two years ago now. He thought of the boys he had trained with, wondering where they might be now, whether any of them were still alive. He thought of Collins, possibly having survived, possibly on one of those brave little civilian boats sailing back to England. He dearly hoped so.

Most of all he thought of Ellie.

Standing in the flickering glow of his burning plane he saw the hints of red in her hair, her smile soft by candlelight.

If he had one regret, it was that he hadn’t kissed her longer, deeper, before having left, that he hadn’t pulled her back to bed and made love to her one more time. That he hadn’t told her loved her nearly enough. That he hadn’t been able to tell her he would be coming home.

_I’m sorry, love._

When the German soldiers appeared over the rise of the dunes, backed by dying sunlight, he remained unmoving, his eyes fixed upon the flames. When they surrounded him, their shouts a garbled mess of many voices turning a lovely language guttural and sour, he was almost, in a way, relieved. When they jabbed the butts of their rifles into his sides and shoved him back the way they’d come, he did not fight them. He went in stoic silence, with his head high. Not just a soldier captured by an enemy, but a man who had done his duty and held to his principles, with the calm, steady conviction of his country.

**_“…we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…”_ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credit to Winston Churchill for the infamous speech he gave to the House of Commons in June 1940.
> 
> I’m not really sure where this came from. I tend to have a lot of fic ideas circulating around in my head that never get written. Something about this one just really needed purging for some reason. Part of that is because we write what we want to read and…as much as I adore this character (and that’s a whole other thing), there is nothing posted anywhere about him that I want to read. This is not to knock those that pair Farrier and Collins, we ship what we ship whyever we ship – I’m here for it and I’m all here for dudes loving dudes – I just don’t see it for them. 
> 
> I thought I was into this character purely for the sake of it being Tom Hardy who I’m super in love with anyway, but especially right now. But I’d only seen the movie once and upon rewatch I found myself having a lot of unexpected feelings about this character. His arc is fictional for the specific time and place, but it’s powerful, and the acting is superb. The heroism in choosing to stay, knowing it will mean becoming a POW and very likely killed and never going home, because it’s right and someone has to…it hit me hard. 
> 
> People are capable of incredible strength and dignity while also being extremely complex inside those things. Honor and right and noble ideals might be why we go to war on the surface, but it’s the tangible, small, human things that truly underline those grand ideas. 
> 
> I’ve been very frustrated by humanity of late, and it was interesting to watch this and have such a powerful need to write something about humanity on this level. Especially since if I was going to obsess about something to this degree outside of my main fic project specifically for purposes of dreamy Tom Hardy fanfics, I would have thought it would be for Lawless. But here we are! Plus just the ‘40s/WWII romantic aesthetic is something I can’t seem to get away from in spite of myself.
> 
> There’s that one, very brief moment when Farrier makes the choice to stay and take out the German plane bombing the ships where he’s clearly pained before resigning himself to it. It made me wonder what and who it was he was leaving behind perhaps never to see again. I just wanted more of a story for this character and I wanted catharsis for what would have been an awful ordeal. (I also gave him a first name since I can find none anywhere...)
> 
> Aaaaaand the rest is what you’ve read. Thank you for doing so.
> 
> Obviously I made a bunch of shit up. I changed some things for brevity and impact over complete accuracy. Flying planes is way more complex than I make it sound, but there’s so much that I just stuck with what I could see on film. But I also did a fuckload of research which likely only 5% of which shows through. A lot of double checking facts compared with the storytelling liberties the movie took – such as where the RAF were during Dunkirk in real life, why the fuel and timing were such a big damn deal, how dangerous it is to have to forcibly leave or land your plane, etc. Some terminology and language aren't entirely accurate: I'm neither British nor in any form of military. I did SO much research, but at the end of the day I just wanted to get the story out. Forgive me the little inaccuracies I’m sure it's riddled with.
> 
> It was also very visually fueled, hence all the images included.
> 
> If you would rather the sad ending, feel free to stop reading here. I get the appeal of a sad ending, and the end of this film is just…fucking art at its finest. But if you want happy, lovey, somewhat-bittersweet catharsis, read on!


	2. Part 2 - After

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For mood, listen to “Green Light,” "Hotel Sayre," and “Magic Tree and I Let Myself Go” from the Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby OST.  
> And for a more period-appropriate sound: “It’s Been a Long Long Time” by Kitty Kallen.

**~April 1945~**

For every seven soldiers that made it out through Dunkirk there was one man left behind.

He wouldn’t learn it until a little under five years after, when the prisoner of war camp where he had been held was liberated by British forces. There was no knowing how many of these had survived to see the end of the war.

He certainly hadn’t expected to be one of them. After years spent in the camps, sick and starving, forced to work or else beaten if he refused, there was no good reason for him still be alive. But by some working of God or the Devil’s own luck, he was. As the relief troops had entered and systematically secured the German guards and officers, he and the rest of the prisoners of Stalag XI-B were promptly fed and ushered onto a train into France, where they were fed again, given baths and clean clothes, and put on a ferry back to England.

It had been a blur of activity, alien and strange after such miserable monotony. He spent most of that handful of days in a state of quiet shock, unable to tell if it was real or another dream summoned by sickness. Not even being truly clean again, having his hair freshly cut and his belly full, was enough to make him believe it. Comfort had become such a rarity that even the tight quarters of the boat had seemed too spacious, too soft, too warm. None of it felt real.

Only when he set foot on English soil did it finally dawn on him that he was neither dreaming nor dead. That he had made it through. And the first thing – the _only_ thing – that he could think of was her.

The London he returned to was not the London he had left. He had expected as much, but even in expectation it was jarring and surreal to see the damage. The empty spaces of buildings no longer standing where they once had, gaping, crumbling holes in roofs and shop fronts. The lingering bits of rubble not yet cleared away.

He had learned about the bombings over the city secondhand, overheard amid snippets of dialogue between two guards estimating how much damage might have been done. As badly as the fear gripping him had made him want to scream and lash out he had stayed still, listened, combed through the scraps of German, hoping for specifics, intended targets, names, a death toll – _anything._ It wouldn’t have mattered. Nothing they had to say could tell him what he needed so desperately to know. All he’d been able to do was muster belief and cling to it as his last tether to the earth and to normalcy. To stave off the madness and exhaustion.

He had seen her when he dreamed: brief, gentle reprieves from the dour slog of the waking hours never quite long enough to last. Little details cradled in his mind like precious gems. The curve of her cheek or a graceful hand, the dip of her waist. The softness of her hair, the texture of her skin. The sound of her laugh. Her voice. Words breathed into the bend of his neck.

_I love you. Come home to me._

She was alive. She had to be.

The first thing he’d done upon being released back to the RAF was to track down a clerk and make him check for a notice – bypassing the direction to report to his commanding officers. Being the wife of a soldier, they would have been notified upon her death. Or, they were supposed to have been.

“You’re sure?” he pressed again, the chipped edge of the desk biting into his palms.

He had to raise his voice to be heard over the din in the room. While the Allied forces had been busy liberating POW and concentration camps, technically the war wasn’t yet over. There had been no surrender. Germany and Italy were still fighting tooth and nail to maintain a foothold of resistance, which meant there was plenty else going on. The command offices were a busy riot of people coming and going, all in varying stages of harried bustle.

A communications officer bearing a clipboard and several files knocked into his back en route somewhere else, but he ignored them, his focus pinned to the bespectacled man behind the desk, still young enough to have spots.

“Yes, Sir,” the clerk insisted, shuffling nervously through the stack of files to put them back in order. “Even if it was delayed, if your wife was killed in the Blitz we would have heard by now.”

“What about after?”

The clerk, already rather pasty, went – if possible – even paler. “Sir, I—all I can tell is that w-we didn’t receive any notice. From what I see she’s alive and still living out in Surrey, but—there’s...”

He forced himself to take a breath, swallowing around the good half of his stomach that seemed lodged in his throat. As the clerk was circumspectly trying not to tell him, there was no way to know for sure. He knew that. Things were missed and even lost during the calmest of times, and he could imagine the percentage of those missing things grew significantly during periods of unrest such as these. That was just going to have to be enough.

“Right. Do you—”

“Farrier!”

He had been about to ask if the clerk knew where to find his Group Captain when he heard his name shouted over the noise and glanced up, peering into the mill of bodies to see the man fighting his way through the aisles. Slim, long-legged and tow-headed, still wearing a life preserver over his fight suit.

“ _Farrier!”_

His name again, syllables blended to a single rolling note, and there was something familiar about it. The man drew closer, enough to for him to make out the narrow, sharply angled face alight with a mad sort or exhilarated glee, and in swift jab to the gut the recognition struck him.

 _Collins._ He had made it out of the plane, out of the Channel. He had made it home.

There were more lines than before, fine creases at the corners of his eyes and mouth – products of worry and strain and a few hard years – but it was him all right.

The other man strode right up and seized him in an embrace tight enough to make his ribs creak. He drew back then, gripping Farrier by the shoulders and staring at him as if he were looking at a ghost. “Christ almighty, it is you,” he wheezed, half out of breath and grinning like an idiot, “I just got back from runnin' reconnaissance—they had the call sheets, told me they pulled you out of a POW camp and brought you back, but I had to see for myself. You’re a right braw sight, lad!”

Farrier gazed, stunned and something close to punch-drunk as he stared back at his former wingman. Still alive, still flying. “You made it out,” he blurted, awed, and nothing short of thrilled.

“Aye, thanks to you.”

There was incredible feeling in the other man’s voice, causing the lilting notes to wobble ever so slightly. Though there had been every chance another enemy plane would show up after he was out of commission to sink their boats, from Collins’ perspective Farrier had saved his life and he was grateful. Farrier understood that, and nodded acknowledgement.

“Does Eleanor know you’re back?”

He shook his head, his agitation returning to him. “No,” he growled, raking a hand through his hair, back and shoulders coiling with tension. “We were shunted down here as soon as we hit the ground. They won’t release me until I see the medics and report in, and no one’s been able to tell me where she is or if she’s even—”

“Easy, man,” Collins soothed, renewing the grip at his shoulder to hold him steady. “She’s all right!”

His eyes shot to the younger man’s narrow face.

“I went to see her when I got back…after,” Collins explained in his soft burr, blue eyes earnest. “I thought she should hear it from someone who was there, not just whoever they sent to deliver the news whenever they got around to it. I’ve been checkin' in on her when I can. She and Beth get on like wildfire—I swear they’re practically like sisters now. I saw her three weeks ago and she was perfectly fine.”

If it wasn’t the swift blow of relief which knocked the wind out of him then it was the gratitude. Those weren’t things just any fellow soldier would have done. They were the actions of a friend.

Reaching, he clasped the other man’s forearm. “Thank you, Collins,” he said, a low tremor in his voice, belying the emotion coursing through him, thick as the oxygen in his blood. “Thank you, I…I owe you.”

Collins scoffed, a low, purely Scottish noise of disdain cradled in his throat. “You don’t,” he said, matter of fact, “but if you’re that set on payin' me back then you can buy me a beer after you’ve been home and settled a while.”

Farrier hadn’t really done a lot of smiling in the last few years, and while he didn’t quite manage to do so now, he felt his eyes crinkle with amusement. “You’re on, mate.”

For a moment he simply regarded the other man, measuring the shift that had occurred between them; a camaraderie forged first out of necessity and respect, and now strengthened by an act of incredible kindness. He had left this man hoping to one day call him friend, only to misplace that hope inside dark places. This, it seemed, was that day.

“It’s good to see you,” he said softly.

Collins smiled. “You as well. Now,” he said cheerfully, clapping Farrier smartly on the shoulder, “I have a report to make, and so do you. Get this bureaucratic shite over with and _go see your wife!”_

The matter, to his thinking, seemed as if it should be quite simple: quick debrief with his Captain, exam down in med-bay, and out for a long stretch of leave. But that was not the way it happened.

The physical, at least, went smoothly. Aside from orders to rest and to consume plenty of protein and vegetables to balance out the effects of poor nutrition, he was given a clean bill of health and sent on his way. The debrief, he was informed, would have to wait until whatever was keeping the officers was resolved. He was forced to stay through the night. He split the hours between the mess, attempting to choke down a truly horrid approximation of Shepherd’s Pie, and an empty office to catch some less than restful sleep.

By the time someone came to fetch him in the morning, his mood was downright cantankerous – restless, growling like a bear and thoroughly irritated.

He was not brought to his Captain to report, however, but before several of the Marshals. He was promoted to Wing Commander, they told him, and he had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for acts of valor, courage, and devotion to duty, in recognition of extraordinary service. His report, they’d said, could be submitted later once he’d had time to recoup from the time spent as an enemy prisoner.

It had been an odd, unsettling experience to be issued the new uniform, adorned with the medal he had never thought to expect. Men he had known before greeted him like a hero and those who had not with an awe and reverence that felt undeserved. He had done what he must, and after that he had merely survived. Neither of those things did a hero make. He didn’t care about rank or commendation, he was only a soldier and content to be so. And he bloody wanted to go home.

He stayed until the very instant he was given his release and not a second longer.

It took another train, a cab, and a full hour to get to the village. Time and travel spent primarily in still silence, watched through windows as the battle-worn city thinned and subsided, as greenery grew more abundant and the marks of war less numerous.

Stepping onto the street on which he hadn’t set foot in over half a decade was like being thrust into the mirror of a memory. So much was the same – almost eerily so. The day was unusually clear for April, though not quite bright enough to be deemed sunny, which might have added to the dreamlike quality of it. But there were little changes, little differences that kept it from feeling like a ghost from a past that now seemed drawn from another life.

“Welcome home, soldier!” a voice called, and he looked over his shoulder to see a man standing in front of the door of a house across the street, craggy face half obscured by thick glasses and a shock of white hair, but not enough to mistake the emotion there. Gladness and sorrow and a fierce, stalwart pride.

The man raised a hand in greeting and he returned it with a nod, unable to help wondering who it was that this man loved who wouldn’t be coming home.

Twice more residents welcomed him with smiles and cheerful greetings. He wasn’t sure if anyone recognized him, he and Ellie hadn’t lived there long before he’d been called away, but it hardly mattered. They would know him in time. For now, they were simply pleased to see him, proud to have him there. He hardly felt worthy of it, yet their pride was not purely for him, but themselves and the men both lost and returned.

The Union Jack adorned nearly every house: hanging proudly from top floor windows and draped reverently over doorframes and poles erected from eaves. One by one he passed them, following the low brick walls along the row half swallowed by ivy and moss. He walked until he came to number 224, where he stopped and, for a moment, just looked; taking in the tidy brick exterior, the brass number over the door painted a rich, dark green. A little shrub full to bursting with yellow flowers had been planted next to the mat, sunny and welcoming. The side gate stood open.

Drawn by some force beyond his understanding or control his feet carried him to it, his hand grazing the old iron as he walked through it.

His nerves were a jangled mess inside his frame, his stomach wringing itself into knots and his heart beating too fast. A cold sweat lined his palms and ran slick along his spine.

It had been nearly five years. While he had been listed as missing in action, she couldn’t have thought he was anything but dead. She would have _grieved_ for him. They could never be what they had once been; too much had happened, they weren’t those people anymore. It was entirely possible what they’d had was simply gone, too damaged to be salvageable. Yet he still found himself clinging to that same scrap of hope that had kept him alive through the worst of it, clutching it tight as he rounded the side of the house and stepped into the garden.

It was there he had left her in fading summer and it was there he found her – a slender shape in a pretty blue dress tucked within the sanctuary of green.

There was a basket of laundry at her feet, clothespins poking from her mouth as she draped a clean white sheet across the line to dry. She was thinner than she had been, a bit of the lushness from pre-war abundance lost to the years of rationing, but she was no less lovely than he remembered. Small and graceful, and bright as morning. The sight of her was like the first sip of water after ten years lived in constant thirst. Within the space of a breath he was flayed raw and open, no longer human but longing made flesh. Parts of himself he had left on the beach in France next to that burning plane came rushing back in a dizzying flood, nearly sending him staggering to his knees.

To his knowledge he hadn’t moved since stopping dead in his tracks at the edge of the yard, yet she glanced up as though something had caught her attention.

Her eyes found him, mild and curious, and at first it seemed as if she didn’t know him, as though she were looking at a stranger. Then she stilled, her eyes suddenly narrowing on his face, soft lips parting.

The wooden pin in her hand fell to the ground as her grip went slack. And then she was running, streaking toward him with something desperate and pleading in her face. Half a second after he was tossing the canvas sack from his shoulder and striding forward, a fist gripping at his heart when he heard the strangled sob in the shape of his name.

She threw herself into him and he caught her around the waist, lifting her right off her feet. Her arms locked around his neck. One hand clutched at his back, the fingers of the other curling into the neatly shorn hair at his nape as she buried her face in the stiff blue collar of his uniform. She was trembling, her entire body shuddering with sobs too fierce even to leave her mouth. Balancing her carefully, he cradled the back of her head with a hand and held her, pressing his cheek to her hair. Breathing filled his lungs with the scent of her – soap and skin and lilacs.

She had always steadied him, grounded him, since that first night when she had regarded with an arched brow and amused little smile. Whatever else might have changed, this had not. All he needed was the curve of her waist against his palm, the swell and contraction of her breathing, and all the restless, nervous energy, the noise clamoring in his skull, calmed.

After what might have been an eternity or a mere handful of seconds she lifted her head, her hands sliding along his jaw to cradle his face as she gazed up at him.

He knew he looked different. He might not be gaunt and starved, but he was hollow in places he had not been before, aged in ways he had not shown. New lines fanned from the corners of his eyes and mouth, and a small scar split the brow over his right eye, the cut at his upper lip still healing from his last beating. Silver streaked his hair. He was thinner, leaner than he had been since boyhood left him. Her fingertips caressed his cheek, the bone of it no doubt sharper than she remembered, but if she saw the differences he couldn’t tell, for she was looking at him no differently than she had before.

Tears glistened at her cheeks and there was pain in her eyes, the marks of a deep and unhealed wound enveloped in the brilliant collision of shock and wonder. But the joy in her smile, pure and full and _fierce_ , outshone everything else.

"You came back to me," she murmured, her voice delicate as a bird.

He felt his mouth curve with his first smile in years. Small, but real, and without falter.

"I made a promise."

He hadn't. And she hadn't asked. Yet, in some way, they both had.

She tipped her head back slightly, eyelids lowering, breath shuddering, and he bent as if beckoned – pulled by the sheer force of the love he had for this woman. Her lips were glazed with the salt of tears, but soft and warm and achingly familiar. He would have known her just by this even if he had been stricken blind and deaf.

It should have been impossible to know just from that – from a look, an embrace. A kiss. But he did. Inexplicably, and to his bones. They might be changed: a little older, a little worn, marked in their own ways by hardship and scars that would never truly heal. But it was as if in being returned to one another the time they’d spent apart had crumbled and slipped away, as though it had never been at all. He didn’t need to ask if he was still hers. He knew it as surely as he felt the tender pressure of her mouth beneath his, the gentle hand at his cheek. As surely as the heart still beat in his chest.

Ellie. _His_ Ellie. Right here, in his arms.

He was finally home.

He had no idea how long they stood there, wrapped up in one another, each unable to bear the thought of moving for the fear the other might disappear if they did.

It was Ellie who moved first, drawing back to study him carefully. She touched a careful fingertip to the silver cross pinned to his chest, a swift wave of intense pride and anguish flickering across her face.

“Are you hungry?” she asked softly, and he knew it would be as close as she came to mentioning the ordeal of the past few years. She could tell enough to surmise, and what she didn’t know he would tell her in time. There was no hurry, and neither of them had any particular desire to bring it up just yet. “You look like you could eat half a dairy cow and still go back for seconds.”

His chuckle was hoarse, unfamiliar. But seemed to lift something from him nothing else quite had yet. He was unsure just how long it was going to take him to feel completely full again, but he wasn’t there quite yet.

“Come on, then,” she said “let’s find you a cow.”

Taking him by the hand, she led him inside.

What changes there were to the interior were so slight he didn’t notice them. Or else he was simply so absorbed in her that he couldn’t have noticed if he wanted to. He watched her move about the kitchen from the chair at the table nearby, maneuvering with a comfortable grace, completely undisturbed by his sudden presence in the space that had been occupied for so long solely by her. It was going to be a little while before he felt as though he truly belonged there again, but it seemed to her that he already did, which would help immensely.

Her hair was shorter. Not by a lot, but enough that he could tell. She had nudged off the flat garden shoes just inside the door and padded about now on bare feet and he could see she wore no stockings. There were no seams trailing up the back of her calves, nor darker nylon spots at heel and toes. The blue dress was simple brushed cotton and buttoned down the front, the neckline dipping just below her collarbones and the sleeves capped short.

Had she always been so beautiful? He could no longer remember. The Ellie fabricated by the man trying desperately to retain hold of his sanity paled greatly in comparison to the one before him. He could see her and touch her, no longer some elusive, too-perfect product of his mind. She was real. That alone made her wondrous.

She brought him a plate heaped with cold chicken and bread that, from the yeasty smell lingering heavy in the kitchen, had been fresh baked that morning – thickly sliced and slathered with butter. That was new. She hadn’t baked much before. Cook, yes, as evidenced by the chicken and the stewed carrots he told her not to worry about reheating, but baking had troubled her a bit. It was _good_ , too. Crusty and flavorful and still warm. He made sure to tell her so, and thoroughly enjoyed the shy little flush of happiness that warmed her skin.

Returning to the kitchen to put away the rest of the food, the hem of her skirt brushing his chair. Suddenly he was gripping her by the wrist to hold her there. She turned to him, startled, the unspoken question in her eyes bordering on concern. He had forgotten how very near to the color of seawater they were, almost stormy, ringed with gray, and beautiful.

“I love you,” he blurted, his gaze steady as he held hers. “I never told you enough.”

Her entire being seemed to soften as she reached to run gentle fingers through his hair. “I know you do, daft man,” she teased with a tiny smile.

Leaning forward, she brushed her lips against his brow. Tension he hadn’t realized he carried uncoiled from his shoulders. He very much wanted to wind his arms around her and rest his head against the smooth skin of her chest above her neckline, just for a moment.

She sat with him while he ate. While he asked careful, probing questions about what her life had been, he learned that one of her sisters had died in the bombing, husband and two children with her. Her mother had taken ill some time later, and after hanging stubbornly on for a good two years, she, too, had passed.

She told him about Collins then – whose first name, as it turned out, was Andrew – coming to the house, grim-faced and stoic, to tell her that her husband had gone down behind enemy lines and give her a thorough, detailed account of what he had witnessed of that last flight. She had been endlessly proud, she said, and utterly devastated. Elizabeth had shown up two days later, all too empathetic to the particular loss that she, too, feared. She had helped Ellie through the worst of those early days, ensuring she ate and slept and got plenty of fresh air, and kept her occupied. From sinking into the inconsolable pain he had so feared to cause her. Collins had routinely checked in with her, instructing firmly that she was to tell him right away if she had need of anything and she was not to fuss about trouble or inconvenience.

Whatever Collins’ insistences to the contrary, Farrier owed him a very great debt indeed. One that he could never repay. And one for which he would be eternally grateful. They hadn’t been close: there had been respect, like-minded thinking, and the seeds of fondness, that was all. But Collins had sought out the wife of his wingman to tell her himself what had befallen her husband, had taken care of her, seen to her health and her happiness, sent her a friend in her time of need. He could not have asked more from a brother.

“They’re getting married in the summer,” Ellie said, with the kind of smile she got when she was heartily amused. “Beth told him she was tired of waiting for him to stop fretting about it, and that if he waited any longer she was going to find someone who would. You’re rather alike in that way,” she mused, the comparison evidently one she found endlessly humorous.

She had continued to work at the munitions factory until it had shut down earlier in the year whereupon she had returned to her secretarial job. Throughout that time she had spent her free hours cooking extra food to bring to the shelters set up as housing for those displaced by destroyed and damaged buildings, and volunteered where she could. And she had inadvertently, as she informed him with embarrassed chagrin, adopted a cat; a neighborhood stray that she had taken pity on once or twice and which now flatly refused to go anywhere else at night.

“I always meant to shoo it away, but I liked having the company.”

“I’m glad you had it,” he told her.

He was rubbing softly at the back of her hand where it was nestled in his, the pad of his thumb skimming her knuckles, the plain gold wedding band that he knew without her telling him had never left her finger.

At no point had it ever occurred to him to ask if there had been someone else while he had been gone. It wouldn’t have mattered if there had. She had thought him dead, he might never have made it back, and he would far rather she had been in someone else’s arms than curled up alone in their bed, grieving endlessly. From all the things she didn’t say, he knew which of these was the more likely, and it wrenched something in his soul open and bleeding.

“I don’t mind cats.”

She couldn’t seem to stop touching him: his face and shoulders, his elbow, his hands, as if she were attempting to make up for lost time. He relished it with the avarice of the long starved, letting his eyes drift closed as she lightly traced the arc of his scarred brow down along the side of his face to his jaw. He wanted to sink into the warmth of her and never come back out.

“You should rest,” she told him gently.

She didn’t say it, but he knew the exhaustion had left its mark in the shadows under his eyes. The travel had been draining and miserable, and it showed.

“Go on up to bed.”

While he was not about to say that his body wasn’t well past the point of knackered and eager for the prospect of sleep, it wasn’t all that he wanted.

He had been too long without her. Without her warmth and weight, the rhythm of her breath. Rest was not going to come easy without her next to him, and he was not ashamed of the plea in his words when he asked: “Come with me?”

Ellie squeezed his hand. “Let me get the rest of the washing up."

He took his time making his way up the stairs, simply absorbing the feeling of being there, recalling little, half-forgotten things with every step. The chip in the banister from when he had carried her up after their wedding, somewhat intoxicated and little ungainly; the heel of her shoe had struck the wood and caused the score, and she had laughed so hard he’d worried she might make herself sick. One of the framed pictures in the hall that hung ever so slightly crooked which neither of them had ever bothered to fix. The creak in the bedroom door that always came back no matter how many times he fixed it.

He stepped inside the little room, running his thumb along the band at the base of his left ring finger. He had never been gladder of his pre-flight habit of removing and stowing his ring for safekeeping, developed out of not wanting to lose it somewhere beyond recovery – thinking it would be in a crevice inside a cockpit, or rolled away across a tarmac upon removal of his gloves. Had it been in his possession, the guards would unquestionably have taken it along with the rest and he truly would never have seen it again.

It seemed such a little thing. A ring was replaceable, after all. He would have learned to live with it. It was more the symbol than the band itself, he thought, and though wearing it again after so long felt strange, he was grateful it had ended up back on his hand and not sent to Ellie in an envelope with cold, impersonal sympathies when the war was officially over.

Yellow flowers cut from the shrub out front had been set in a little vase of water on the bureau. He let his fingertips brush the petals, touch the little cut-glass bottle which contained her perfume and the smooth wooden handle of her hairbrush. His shaving things were clean of dust but otherwise untouched. Waiting for him. And she had been washing his clothes.

He hadn’t realized it until after he’d opened a drawer and pulled out a clean pair of underwear. Having been left to sit there for so long, he instinctively expected his clothes would be musty, perhaps even a little moth-eaten, yet they would still be far better than the travel-stale ones he wore. They would be his, not ill-fitting and standard issue. It wasn’t until he caught a whiff of soap, and raised the fabric to his nose that he noticed they had been washed, and recently.

She hadn’t known…she couldn’t have. Had she been washing his things all this time? In the hope that he might yet find his way back and have need of them, or because it had been a way to be close to him, to keep some small part of him alive?

He undressed with no small amount of relief, stripping from the stiff uniform and trading uncomfortable underthings for the clean and far softer ones.

Life in the corps had instilled a habit of wearing undershirts to bed in the event they had to be up and moving rapidly and had less time to dress before being tossed out into the cold for early drills – which had happened enough to make an impression. When they’d grown intimate enough to share a bed for more than sex, Ellie had made it known that she preferred him bare-chested. The better to leech from his warmth, she’d said, though he had suspected she just liked looking at him. After four plus years spent staying as clothed as possible for as long as possible for similar reasons, he thought it might make him uneasy to remain so exposed. It didn’t.

He forewent the shirt.

When Ellie came in it was to find him in the midst of examining his new uniform, fingering the third stripe of black and pale blue braid at the cuff of one sleeve.

“I noticed that,” she remarked, hand brushing softly along his back as she passed behind him to the bureau. Such a touch was usually absentminded, born of unthinking familiarity and easy comfort. This one was very intentional. “They moved you two ranks? That’s unusual, isn’t it?”

“Mmm,” he affirmed, letting the sleeve slip from between his fingers. “For _extraordinary valor and sacrifice in service to king and country,_ or some rot.” Draping the jacket neatly upon a hanger he tucked it into the wardrobe.

“It’s not rot, James.”

There was an edge to her voice that he didn’t expect. Turning to look at her, he saw something raw and vulnerable in her expression. It wasn’t outright anger, but it was something very near to it.

“You could have come home,” she said, and the words a little too quiet, a little too hard. “I know what your orders were. There was nothing to stop you, but you chose to stay when you could have turned back.”

It took a great deal out of him to curb the flinch.

“No,” he said quietly, “I couldn’t have.”

For what else could he say? What else was there to say but the truth of it, that he wouldn’t have been able to live with it? His actions were his, and they had hurt her – something for which he would be spending the rest of his life in atonement for. But he couldn’t change what was.

“No,” she echoed, and where he almost expected the bite of censure, of pain, there was none. Only calm and gentle frankness. The faint exhalation of a sigh. “You couldn’t have.”

When he looked at her it was to find a knowing softness in her face, a fine thread of steel that brooked no argument, and so much love that he could scarcely breathe to see it.

He had misunderstood. He had assumed she was angry at his choice, but it was his flippancy which had stung. She could tell the commendations chafed at him, that they felt unearned. But to her…to her they were more than simple honorary gestures made in payment for a service done.

His sacrifice, he remembered, was not solely his own. Those five years had been stolen from her just as much as from him, and to shrug off something meant to pay deference to that was to disrespect _her_ loss. _Her_ pain. Her tears and blood and nights spent screaming into the sky. She knew full well it wasn’t for the officers that he had defied orders and sentenced himself to capture, nor even the country – grand, feverish ideal that a nation became in the midst of a hail of bullets and impossible choices. She knew _him_ , as she had graciously reminded him with just enough blunt force to get through his thick skull.

It would not be a mistake he ever made again.

"I'm sorry,” he told her, feeling like the worst kind of bastard and having no idea what to say. “I didn't mean...I'm sorry."

"I know," she said simply.

And she did, truly, but that didn't mean she was going to put up with his rubbish. She had never been the kind of woman who told him what he wanted to hear, and if he were being honest, it was one of the reasons she centered him the way she did.

“Now get to bed, you great idiot,” she ordered with a smile, shoving playfully at his arm.

He lay propped up against the headboard to watch her undo the buttons down the front of her dress, one after another. He could tell just by the way it fell that there was no girdle squeezing at her waist and hips, and no padded brassiere either. Only the simple slip, white as cloud and falling just above her knees, a hint of lace framing her breasts.

She had barely set aside the dress and lowered herself to the side of the bed when he reached for her, snaring her about the waist and pulling her down against him. With a muted squeal and a laugh, she tucked herself into his side, lowering her head to the flat space below his collarbone.

He caught her hand in his and lifted it to his mouth, pressing his lips to the backs of her fingers and holding here there. Then, lowering his arm, he cradled her palm against his heart and closed his eyes.

In his mind they were shut for no more than a few moments, a minute at most. Yet when he opened them again the room was swathed in shadows, the sky outside the window growing dark enough to tell him the sun was close to setting. He was still flat on his back, having slept so deeply that he had hardly moved at all. Ellie, however, had rolled to her other side to face away from him.

Given how long he must have been asleep, he would have expected her to get up after a while, leave him to his rest and go about whatever else she had planned for the day. Unless she’d done so and simply got back before he woke – and somehow he didn’t think she had – she hadn’t left him. At some point she had drifted off, too, for her breathing was even and slow. Yet even in sleep she seemed unable to stray far enough to not be touching him. Her back was pressed to the arm he had folded across his middle, the curve of her bottom resting lightly against his hip.

It was no surprise to him how he could have slept so long or so well, not to mention deeply. His mind was geared to wake at any slight sound or movement, in case he needed to be up and moving quickly whatever the reason, but it was difficult not to feel perfectly safe and secure with a woman curled calm and at ease beside him. All the more so when that woman was this one.

Careful to keep from jostling her, he shifted to his side, sliding his arm across her waist and folding his body around her, burying his face in her hair.

How many hours had he spent wishing for this? Just this: holding her, feeling her. Hours spent lying on damp stone floors and hard, rickety cots during nights when sleep refused to come. The work he hadn’t minded so much – though it had grated and stung to know every crop he tended, every piece of machinery he welded and assembled, would be put to use against his own countrymen whether directly or not. It had been a focus, something to occupy him. Without it, had he been left to waste away in a cell, he would have gone mad within months. Some prisoners had found solace enough to keep them going in faith, but that hadn’t worked for him. God wasn’t what kept him sane. That had been solely due to the occupation, and Ellie.

Head tilting down his lips met the bare slope of her shoulder, his fingers curling into the silky cloth draped across her belly when he felt the soft stirring in his blood.

He hadn’t been this close to a woman since leaving her. He’d had opportunities on the slogging trek back through Germany and France. Many others had done so, needing comfort and to purge some of their demons with women likely just as in need of seeing to demons as they were. He simply hadn’t been interested. He was, apparently, the rarity among men committed completely to his wife even in times of strain. So he’d been told. With a fair bit of amused hassling. But the truth of it was that it was difficult even to want something when one had spent so much time longing for something else.

Solitude had not been plentiful. Granted only in scraps, most of which had been the result of convenience or chance. But there had been many a time during those precious moments when he had thought of her: bare and beneath him, above him, bent over the kitchen table or sprawled across the bed. Her hands on him, her mouth on his skin or lips around his cock, lying back with his head buried between her legs.

It should have seemed wrong – out of place in the extreme – to think of her like that in such a context. But it hadn’t.

His time had been in work camps, not a prison. They were never starved or mistreated to the point where they could not work, and it had kept him just healthy enough for his mind to wander on its own, seizing upon his desperate pining for his wife and giving him something he could do about it. There had been, strangely, a sense of normalcy in those moments. It had felt, just for a little while, as if he were just some regular man heartsick for his sweetheart a long way away. Somewhere there were no bars or guns or yet more drudgery to come. Just him and his hand, his thoughts of her; spilling in the showers or into a rag in his cot.

Even after all this time, his body recognized her. She might have been a little thinner, her bones a little sharper, but he knew her, and he was suddenly very aware of just how long it had been since he had felt her like this. So sudden that it was as if his skin had abruptly become both chilled and inflamed, as if his insides were cramping like he’d eaten something off. Except it wasn’t that at all.

Her body was heavy and relaxed, and so damn _warm_. He curled more tightly around her, lips parting against her skin as he kissed the gentle curve of her neck.

Almost of its own accord his hand slid up along the arc of her ribcage to her breasts. The incredible softness of her filled his palm. Hell and damnation, she was exquisite. How could he have forgotten? Had he? Or was he simply in shock for the fact that she was really here under his hands and not a product of a fever-dream? He traced the nipple through the slippery fabric, circling with the pad of his index finger and swallowing down a groan when it tightened almost immediately at the touch.

With a muted sound she stirred, stretched, arching her back and unintentionally nudging her hips into his.

The breath left him in a hard burst as the sweet pressure of it reached beyond the realm of delicious and tipped straight into ecstasy. Her arm moved, almost sleepily, reaching until her smooth little hand found the back of his thigh. She slid upward, fingers grazing across the fabric of his briefs to still just beneath his backside where they spread, grasped him, and pulled as if to force him closer.

He was utterly unable to stop himself from rolling his hips up into her, dragging his rapidly hardening cock against the lush swell of her arse, the blood in his veins pulsing when he felt the soft ripple of the shudder course through her back and straight through his front.

It was as if five years’ worth of hunger welled up from wherever he’d been keeping it within the space of seconds, colliding brutally with all the heady joy and relief of being home. Of being _alive_. He was not a man in that moment. He was raw feeling and blunt, animal need, and he _needed_ to be inside of her, as close to her as he could physically be or else he was going crumble apart at the seams.

Wrenching himself upright he gripped her by the hip and yanked her down onto her back.

Her breath left her in a quavering rush as she fell back against the pillow. She lay there open and welcoming, her eyes dark and her hair disheveled about her face, lips parted in soft anticipation. The hem of her slip had ridden up her thighs, one of the straps slipped down her shoulder, the neckline dipping low enough that he could just make out the pink flush of her nipples under the lace. His cock swelled painfully at the sight of her.

His clever, beautiful wife. Steady as the earth amidst a gale.

His hands found her hem, shoving it up past her hips so he could grip the cotton underneath. With a smooth, harsh yank of fabric she was bare – the pale, milky whiteness of her skin broken only by neat red-gold curls. His fingers curled around the underside of her knee. Forcing her thighs apart he held her there, spread wide, wedging himself between them and pinning her right leg to the bed. He felt her fingers sliding through his hair when he leaned heavily upon his forearm and fumbled with his waistband.

Desperate and fever-mad, he didn’t check first to ensure she was wet enough to take him, but when he gripped her by the backside and shoved into her he found her slick and hot and so deliciously tight that it ripped the breath right out of him.

He dropped his head, pressing his face into the arch of her neck in time to feel the fine vibration of her whimper. There was just enough sense left to determine it had not been a sound of pain before his mind abandoned him.

He wasn’t gentle. He was frantic and uncontrolled. His fingers were digging into her flesh, his thrusts harsh and bordering on brutal. There was a faint spark of worry in the recesses of his brain shrieking that he was being far too rough with her; yet that same spark trusted her to throw him back on his arse if he was. And she just kept stroking her hand up and down the nape of his neck, the other gripping tight to his shoulder while her hips flexed to coax him deeper. He was utterly unable to do anything but fuck into her pliant warmth until he split apart. Which he did. Quickly, and with a violence beyond his ability to process with any amount of grace.

She held him through it, cradling the back of his head and stroking gently at his arm as it tore him open like a knife. As he shuddered and jerked – clumsy, gasping, and ragged. She held him as the spasms eased. Held him as the tension bled away to render him boneless and he sagged, limp and heavy atop her.

It was only minutes before he could move again, but he had no idea whether it was closer to five or thirty, and when he finally regained the muscle control to lift his head it was with bleary eyes and an apology ready on his lips.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice weak and short of breath. “That’s not—that’s not how I would have…liked that to be.”

“Are you ok?” her voice was calm, only the faintest hint of concern woven underneath.

He wasn’t sure how to answer the question. It hadn’t exactly been an enjoyable experience; less a thing of pleasure as of…well, of purging demons. He felt flayed and scraped down to the marrow, but also _relieved_ , somehow. He wasn’t sure he could explain if he tried. Yet she didn’t seem to be asking him to. She just wanted to know, very simply, if he was all right.

“I think so.”

He touched her hair, smoothing a curling lock of it away from where it clung to her cheek. Then he felt her move, her knee shifting where it still folded around his hip as if to displace discomfort and the full reality rose up to meet him with a slap straight to the face.

“Fucking hell, Ellie,” he swore, immediately lifting his weight off her trapped leg. “Are _you_ all right?”

She rolled her eyes, but her words were gently patient. “Yes, darling. I’d have kicked you off the bed otherwise.”

“I rather wish you had done.”

He had never treated a woman like that before – _used_ them like that, so thoughtlessly, selfishly. He was intensely uncomfortable that he had done so, and done so with _her_.

Christ, he had essentially just _attacked_ her. It might not have been outright assault, he’d retained enough wherewithal to recognize the encouragement and known she wasn’t trying to stop him, but it definitely had not been focused in any way to make it good for her. He had been too unhinged even to alter his angle, or do anything expect clutch at her and rut. It was a clumsy, unforgivable _travesty_.

“You needed it,” she said simply. His frown had carved deep furrows into his brow and Ellie lifted a hand, brushing light fingertips across them as if she could smooth them away. “I’m all right, love. I wouldn’t have let you hurt me.”

He wasn’t sure her acceptance absolved him, but if she said she was all right he needed to take her at her word.

With a noncommittal sound he rose from the bed.

Underthings half off and now something of a mess, he kicked them off altogether and walked naked across the hall to the tiny bathroom, where he quickly and efficiently washed himself. Taking a clean cloth from the basket that had moved down one shelf since his leaving, he wet it with warm water and brought it to her. She thanked him with a kiss, and cleaned up the worst of the mess he’d made.

She left for her own trip to the bathroom then, leaving him to grind the heels of his palms into his eye sockets.

All the time he had spent fantasizing about what it would be like if he ever did get back to her, this had _not_ been what he had imagined. And he’d known it wouldn’t be. The second he got her on her back he had known as surely as he’d felt his own heart hammering in his throat that it wasn’t going to be tender and loving. It was wasn’t going to be what either of them wanted, and not at all what she deserved. Still, it made a certain sense. Coming back had hit him harder than he could have prepared for, and while he might no longer be there physically, he wasn’t completely free of the camps.

She had been such a crucial element of his survival that being near her again had gone rapidly from wonderful to overwhelming. He’d seen her, alive, there, real in front of him, and channeled all the hopelessness and rage and the hollow, unfulfilled longing directly into her. It had been, he suspected now, somewhat inevitable. As she’d said, something in him had needed it. He just hoped that whatever precisely it was, he no longer did.

It was properly dark now, the sky clinging to the last dregs of deep orange before the indigo-violet blanket of night swallowed them. Reaching for the lamp at the little table in the corner beside the bed he switched it on, bathing the room in a warm yellow light.

Ellie returned a moment later, cloth gone, slip righted.

She padded back across the room, lamplight turning her skin golden and catching the red in her hair, satiny fabric moving like liquid with her shape. He found himself staring, captivated. “How is it possible for you to have gotten even more beautiful?” he asked, meaning every word of it.

She snorted, amused. “Cheeky,” was her scolding retort, but he could tell from the precise curve of her smile when she folded her knees underneath her to sit that she was pleased.

“I have something for you.”

He wasn’t sure what it was that had reminded him, but it didn’t much matter. Getting up, he went to the wardrobe and fished the neatly folded square of tissue from one of the pockets.

“I found it on the walk to the train back to France,” he explained, tipping it into her hand.

She shot him a questioning glance, but carefully folded back the corners of thin paper.

In addition to liberating prisoners the advance groups had been securing houses and castles belonging to some of the wealthier German families listed as Nazi-sympathizers. There had been a bit of looting done. Most larger, more obvious things – things quicker to be missed – were left alone but smaller objects had often found their way into the odd pocket. This one in particular had been among a small hoard of objects collected by one particularly light-fingered Corporal who had given it over immediately upon his show of interest.

“ _Go on, then,”_ the man had told him amiably, “ _I’m just goin’ to sell or give it all up anyway. If you’ve got a home for somethin’, then that’s where it ought t’ go.”_

“Anyway, it reminded me of you.”

Cupped in her palm was a single pearl, almost perfectly round and the color of fresh cream. It had been set within a delicate coil of rose gold and strung from a chain to create a pendant, and was likely very old, possibly an heirloom. He had glimpsed it among the other trinkets, many flashier and more intricate, and had thought immediately of her – simple, elegant, and lovely.

His wife, it seemed, had been overcome by a momentary and extraordinarily rare state of speechlessness.

Gathering the chain, he lifted it to her neck, reaching around and beneath her hair, securing the clasp by feel. The pearl fell the perfect mid-point between the hollow of her throat and the shadowed valley between her breasts, the pink-tinted gold a warm compliment to her skin. Her hand rose, gingerly touching the chain.

“I’m already in love with you,” she said faintly, as though she were a bit breathless, “you don’t have to work so hard.”

“Rubbish. You could use a good bit of wooing.”

He kissed her, just at the corner of her lips, feeling her hand extend to slide up his chest before tilting his head and taking her mouth.

It was tender, gentle. A soft pressure, lips parted but only to touch. Trading breath, but no more. His hand curled into her hair, the base of his palm resting at the side of her neck, feeling her pulse against his wrist. His other arm looped behind her back and pulled her to his chest – wanting her closer, to feel the comfortable weight of her against him. It was the way he should have kissed her rather than falling on her like some feral thing. The way he should have touched her. The way he had dreamed so many times.

“I thought of you,” he murmured against the fine, delicate slope of her cheek. “Often. It was one of the things that reminded me I was still alive.”

He had meant the less lascivious moments, when he’d imagined holding her hand, brushing her hair for her. When he had pictured the way she sat sideways on the window seat in the front room, shoulder to the glass and feet tucked against the corner to read. The way she sipped at her tea and slung back her whiskey like a sailor. Little, innocent things that he had missed. Even in the worst parts of that place, all he had wanted was her.

He felt the shiver chase down her back, a little echoing pang in his gut, reminding him of some of the distinctly less than innocent thoughts he’d entertained.

“I thought of you, too.”

She said it so quietly, hushed nearly to be hidden under her breath. There was nothing about her tone to suggest it, but in conjunction with that little shiver and the way she shifted, as if nursing discomfort, he knew precisely what she meant.

When he drew back to look at her he found her with a charming blush high and pink in her cheeks. She met his gaze evenly, a bit shy, but unashamed, and the idea of her lying here – right here in this bed – missing him, sliding the hem of her nightdress up to touch herself to thoughts of him...

Heat curled, slow and smoldering, deep in his belly. His cock twitched, as if he hadn’t come so hard he’d nearly gone blind not ten minutes ago.

He tucked her hair back behind an ear, letting his fingers trace lightly along the outer curve of it. “What did you think about?”

He felt her breath catch and stutter, saw her pupils dilate, blue eyes gone hazy – the way they had been before his temporary descent into madness had ruined things. Not this time. Like him, she had been left with no more than the pale imitation of reality for too long. He was going to give her the reunion she should have had: sweet and loving, maybe a little dirty. And he was going to pleasure her absolutely senseless.

She was biting at her lip, the sight of it sending a sharp stab of lust through his gut.

“I…” Her breath was shallow, the one word leaving her as though it had taken quite a lot of work to produce it.

Another coiling throb of need.

“What did you think about? My hands?”

 _Damn_. She wasn’t the only one a little overly sensitive to the interaction. He hadn’t talked to her like this since fairly early on when he had still been learning what she liked, and the effect on him – let alone on _her_ – was not insignificant. He was not at all surprised that his voice had dropped and deepened.

“My mouth?”

Her throat contracted, a reflexive swallow. He could feel her fidgeting, pressing her thighs together in that unmistakable search for friction. Leaning, he kissed the little tender place behind her ear, relishing the jump of her pulse. He inhaled, drawing the scent of her deep into his lungs. Lightly floral, citrusy, salty with the musk of arousal.

“Did you think about my cock, dove?”

The same cock currently swelling ever harder by the second.

“Yes,” she said, breathy and weak.

His arm tightened around her middle, hauling her sideways until she spilled into his lap, his hand sliding along the dip of her waist and up to palm her breast. She pressed up into his touch, sweet little nipple tight against his palm.

He ran his tongue up the shell of her ear, abandoning her flesh for a moment to tuck his index fingers under the straps at her shoulders to side them down. The slip slithered down to catch at her hips, and he pulled back to look at her, bare and pale and luscious – nipples flushed and beaded, begging for touch. His fingertips found one, grazed lightly. Teasing until she arched and panted, her nails curling into the meat of his shoulder.

Other hand cradling the base of her neck, he kissed her. It started gently, a mere soft pressure. But suddenly it was _hungry,_ slanting and hot. And the _sound_ she made at the shallow thrust of his tongue into her mouth, the low, drawn-out moan…was pure lust.

“Lie back,” his voice was downright gravelly, rasping in his throat.

“Mm—what?”

“Lie back,” he said again, momentarily distracted at the tease of her tongue at his lower lip. “I want to look at you.”

With a bit of reluctance, Ellie acquiesced. She leaned slightly away from him, gathering the slip where it was rucked around her hips and pulling it up over her head to toss it away. Hands sliding down to support her bottom, he guided her back so that her knees were bracketing his sides, resting over his hips, angled carefully so that his shin didn’t dig into her back.

Hellfire, she was bloody stunning: naked but for the necklace at her throat, hair a burning golden tangle, breasts pale and perfect, soft belly, graceful hips cradled in his hands. The position left her thighs open, giving him a perfect view of that lovely, pink place between them.

The heat in his groin gave an eager, appreciative throb. It might have been partly because he was head over heels for her, but _fuck,_ she had such a pretty cunt. He thought about asking her to show him, have her slip her hand down to her quim and illustrate how exactly she had pleasured herself, but it would have to wait. He wanted to touch her too damn badly, wanted to watch her sigh and tremble and come apart as he did.

Softly affectionate, he let his hand skim across the slope of her belly before moving down. Her breath choked on a whimper as his fingers slid against her and _oh,_ Christ almighty, she was so damn _wet_ – like fire and honey. So ready for him to slip inside and rock them both into a shuddering stupor. All it would take was a little adjustment on his part: shift to the right, up onto his knees, and pull her up against him.

He forced himself to breathe slowly, evenly. He was already hot to the point of fever for her, but he wanted her good and aching before he got anywhere near her with his cock again.

“Do you want my fingers or my mouth?” he asked roughly. She’d be getting all of it eventually, but he wanted her to guide which direction he was going first.

Dragging the tip of his middle finger up, he parted slick, swollen folds and she gasped, eyelids fluttering.

“Fingers or mouth, Ellie?”

“I... _ah—“_ she panted, her hips jerking as he found the bead of her clit and circled gently. “ _Hhn,_ f-fingers,” she finally managed on a whimper.

_Yes ma’am._

He stroked her, deliberate and sure, drawing his fingers through soft, glistening flesh. Down and back up, sliding slick fingers briefly across the center of nerves at the apex before dragging back down. Her hips moved, small involuntary arcs against his hand. There was a little crease between her brows, a frown that was at once the strain of pleasure and the dazed impatience of frustration. She had braced one of her hands against the bed for leverage as she tried to force him to move the way she wanted him to. Demanding _more_. Her fingers were curling against his forearm above where his other hand still held her by the hip, nails raking softly across his skin, leaving lines that tingled pleasantly.

Her lips parted on a huff of breath, shiny where she had just run her tongue along the bottom. “I want—”

The words crumbled at a particularly firm thrust of his hand straight down through her wetness.

Honestly, it was one of the things he loved most about working her up – getting to that point when she was so needy and tense that she could hardly speak. He knew what she wanted. It wasn’t difficult to tell when she was clawing at his arm like that, and knowing what she had meant by asking for his fingers. His bollocks gave a nice, solid clench, thoroughly pleased by the woman half sprawled in his lap wanting any part of him inside her as much as by the sight of her, flushed and restless. He was very tempted to oblige her. But far more determined to take his damn time.

“No, dove,” he told her, voice low enough to approach a growl, “not until you’ve had yours and plenty of it.”

He withheld from her, never quite breaching her opening but skimming, circling, dipping slightly, like he might have with her mouth. She liked being touched like this anyway – more when she wasn’t quite so desperate for something specific – but as sensitive as she was right now, he probably could have made her come just like that. She couldn’t even articulate an argument, too lost to her own sensation to tell him off or knee him in the ribs to punish him for being a bastard.

After a moment he relinquished his grasp at her hip to touch her with both hands, thumbing at that sweet, tight little spot with one and teasing at her opening with the other. She was still clutching his wrist, feeling the muscle in his arm flex as he touched her. He could almost imagine she was guiding him, telling him directly how and when to stroke and slide and press.

Her spine curved, an elegant bend thrusting her breasts up, her thighs falling wider and grinding herself wantonly up against his hand in a way that had him hurriedly grasping for something bland and uninteresting to focus on. Cricket. Mashed peas. The Queen’s arse. Something, anything to remain composed, to stay the course and not give in to the near urgent desire to curl his fingers and plunge deep into her tight, luscious heat.

She whined, low and loud in her throat and a shudder worked down his spine at the sound, clenching around his cock like a fist.

He was panting himself now, stroking her with desperation of his own because not even thinking of the Queen was working to bring him down and he was not all that sure he wasn’t going to just spill like a boy just from watching her.

She arched and shuddered, head craned back and hair wild, skin near to glowing with a fine sheen of sweat. And then – thank good, merciful _god_ – she jerked with a strangled cry as the pleasure crested and broke.

A rush of liquid heat coated his fingers, and he couldn’t swallow his own groan. He knew there were men in the world, and plenty of them, that neither knew nor cared enough to elicit this kind of response in the women they bedded. And he quite simply _did not_ understand how or why any single one of them wouldn’t have given their very souls to see and hear and feel such a glorious thing. It was pure poetry – primal, earthy perfection. Better than anything just short of being inside her.

He gave her a moment to recover, running his hands down the outsides of her hips and thighs, momentarily soothing before he moved down the bed and rolled to his spread knees. Folding his arms under the bend of her legs he bent, hiking her thighs up over his shoulders, hearing her gasping, ragged moan when he set his mouth to her still quivering flesh. He groaned with her, his eyes nearly rolling back in his head at the taste – the unbelievable _heat_ of her.

Her hand was in his hair, fingers curling reflexively. He dragged his tongue through her swollen folds, drinking in the sweet-and-musk flavor, palm curving with the shape of her waist and sliding to cup the weight of one pert little breast. Glancing up along the length of her splayed body he saw her lips move on a silent plea.

He slid two fingers into her, watching her slender neck arch and her teeth bite down on her lip as if to contain the sound trying to wrest from her mouth. The muscles in her cunt, already so sensitive and aching, gripped him tightly; his fingers making slick, wet sounds as he thrust into her, firm and sure. It was utterly obscene and indescribably delicious. She was rocking sharply, fucking herself with his fingers and his tongue, and he was all too happy to feed those sweet, keening cries. Plunging deeper, harder, fingertips curving as if beckoning.

_Come for me, beautiful girl._

She writhed, lovely voice rising to a broken wail as she shattered and clenched, pulling at his fingers and bathing his tongue with liquid pleasure.

Slipping his arms out from under her weak and shivering legs, he straightened. His hand curved around and under her thigh, the other going almost helplessly to his cock – painfully hard, swollen and weeping at the tip – and stroked once, a little too firmly to be lazy. Lifting by her soft little bottom he angled himself against her opening and sank into her to the hilt.

“ _Uhhn_ —” Ellie gasped, back arched and head lolling.

He quite sympathized. She was still pulsing, cunt gripping convulsively at his cock and it was taking all he had not to lose himself right there.

For a good few moments he didn’t move but for the breath forced between his teeth. When he did it was to drop down to the bed in order to blanket her with his body, bearing the weight with his arms, lowering his head to press long, open-mouthed kisses to the arch of her neck.

She hitched her knees high at his sides, legs folding around him in clear request to move. Releasing a sharp noise of annoyance when he didn’t.

“ _Damn it,_ James,” she snapped, flustered, and he raised his head just long enough to look her in the eye.

“I lost five years with you. If you think I’m not going to make the most out of every second I have left then you’re completely barking.”

Her expression twisted, somewhere between fury and amusement. He just lowered his head back to her skin, mouthing at the soft swell of her breasts – toying with the nipples, tight and swollen pink. Darting, swirling with his tongue, pulling them into the heat of his mouth and sucking gently. She squirmed and bucked up against him, her hands sliding roughly along his back and shoulders, raking through his hair. And then, finally, because he literally could not stay still any longer, he withdrew. Thrusting back slow and deliberate, ensuring she felt every single inch of him.

She shuddered, her thighs hugging tighter, her cunt gripping impossibly, clenching around him like hot, wet silk.

“Jesus, Ellie…” he groaned.

She felt so fucking _good_. So much better than anything any dream could produce, pale, pathetic imitations that they were. His next thrust was deeper, and she met him with a roll of her hips that sent sparks of pleasure bursting behind his eyes.

He could feel it in his back now, streaking up along either side of his spine like coils of lightning, building deep down in his thighs and belly. He knew he wasn’t going to last long enough to work her back to breaking around him, but that was all right for now. There would be plenty of time for that – seeing as how he had every intention of keeping her right here in bed for at least a week.

Slender hands gripped the sides of his face, pulling his head up for her to slant her mouth across his and kissing him fiercely. Reaching over his shoulder she clung to his back, her other looping up from underneath to grip him firmly by the buttocks, both permission and a polite order to stop messing around.

And so he did.

Hands flat and gripping the bedding he slid into her. Thrusts measured and sure, arcing his hips in the way guaranteed to hit that soft little place inside her and, if not make her unravel, at least ensure she thoroughly enjoyed every second. She pulled his lip between her teeth, biting softly, and he growled, slamming deeper and burning with vicious satisfaction at her breathy cry of pleasure.

He was drowning, _throbbing,_ his harsh, labored panting dissolving into guttural moans as he fucked her deep into the bed.

He missed it immediately when her hand left his backside, momentarily puzzled when he felt her knuckles graze his belly…the remaining blood in his brain left it in a heady rush.

She was stroking at her clit, rubbing tight little circles into the swollen bud of nerves. He had thought she would be too sensitive, too raw, but _Jesus_ bloody _Christ_ she was going to come on his cock and he just had to hold on long enough to get her there.

He shortened his thrusts, angling up. And _yes_ , there – that very specific flutter of internal muscles that heralded climax. She was gasping into his mouth, each exhale punctuated on a broken little whimper; and he was hunching around her, pleasure surging, stretching along the razor’s edge of snapping. So close. So damn close…

 _Come on, love,_ he pleaded, having no control over his voice to say it.

She stiffened, convulsed, her back arching so sharply that he thought she might hurt herself. But her face was stricken, contorted with bliss bordered on agony, and she was clenching around him like a vice, squeezing tight and lush and perfect.

He splintered, his very bones pulling apart as the pain of it blazed through him, the ecstasy following sharp on its heels. Then it pulled him under, swift and _savage_ and blinding. He was burying himself deep, spilling into her softness, her sweet, tight heat, and he could no longer tell which way was up or where he was only that he was exactly where he was always supposed to be.

Right here. With her.

When the grip of incoherency eased, the first thing he became aware of was the deep, wrenching sound of Ellie’s weeping.

It had happened before, these sharp, uncontrollable sobs wracking her entire body directly after. But it was rare. A result of excruciatingly intense emotion. She had to feel connected to him in a very specific way, she’d said, though she hadn’t been able to articulate how that was exactly – he hadn’t really needed to know anything aside from that he shouldn’t be alarmed, only touched.

She clutched him tightly as she cried, her face buried in the side of his neck. There was an almost desperate edge to it as she clung with shivering limbs, as though she was subconsciously trying to keep him from slipping away.

He rolled them carefully to one side so that he could fold his arms around her, and he held her, stroking her hair and murmuring assurances to her.

_It’s all right. I’m here. I’m not leaving you ever again._

Gradually the sobbing subsided, the last remnants of all that tension and pain, the poison of grief she had been carrying for the last five years, bleeding away bit by bit. She pried herself from his throat and lay her head against the pillow, sniffling. He brushed a thumb across her cheek, reddened and a bit blotchy from the force of it, and smoothed away some of the tears still clinging there.

She drew in a shaky breath. “I need you to know,” she said, her hand sliding up along his side in a soft caress. “Even when they told me what happened—I never regretted saying yes.”

The emotion that flooded him was strong enough to wind him completely. Sorrow and awe and deep, soul-bearing devotion. His heart throbbed, throat tight, and his eyes stung, vision blurring. And he didn’t give a damn if tears of his own slipped free. He hadn’t thought there was anything she could say to him more meaningful or powerful than that she loved him.

He had thought wrong.

“I’ll love you until I die,” he said, hoarse, and rather ungraceful.

Ellie smiled, running a tender thumb of her own across his cheek.

“I know, insufferable man.”

And she kissed him.

**“** **Thank you for loving me when I still tasted of heartache and war.”**

**-Nikita Gill**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pure-ass fanservice for my damn self and anyone else with any emotion for this character/situation at all. 
> 
> Chances are probably pretty slim that someone would have made it so long in a POW camp. Maybe not. But it seems unlikely. I wanted to touch on the kinds of trauma this might cause, but at the same time I never really wanted this fic to be about the negative aspects – especially not this part. 
> 
> As I said last chapter, I just really needed this man to have a wife whom he loved to get home to and to get there and have a lovely emotional reunion and cuteness/sweetness. And some goddamn CATHARSIS, with a few bittersweet moments along the way. And, you know, some good not necessarily period-accurate sex. Which is not to say there probably weren’t plenty of men who knew how to have good sex with ladies in the ‘40s. But…probably not many, let’s be real.
> 
> Also yay, Collins! I just want there to be more good friendships between men and between women in media. Full stop.
> 
> Anyway. This demon in my brain has been purged, and I am happy and the better for it. Though I still – and probably always will – have a lot of feelings.
> 
> GIGANTIC thank you to my closest friend in the world for listening to me whine and angst about this for the past however long (time is meaningless in the COVID-19 era), and for sending me the quote which then gave me a title for this monster and simplified the entire theme of the piece.
> 
> If you’ve read this far, bless you. If you enjoyed, I’d love to hear from you what you liked if you have a moment. Otherwise, thank you, and I love you.
> 
> <3


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